A Year Learning Arabic

Wow, another year has flown by!

I'm going to be straight with you. Learning Arabic was HARD for me. Overall, it was a fun learning experience, and I learned a few good lessons about learning a language on your own.

Here's a video of me speaking Lebanese Arabic at the end of the year. I've put the transcript below because I wasn't able to add subtitles in. (As always, this is the best I could do. There are definitely errors, but what I transcribed is what I was trying to say.) You can decide for yourself if you feel like I've accomplished what I set out to do in the beginning of the year. If you forget what my goals were, check them out in my first post: Welcome!

Transcript of English translation from video:

Hello, today is a new year.

I'm happy. 2020. But today I also finish my work with Arabic.

I can speak Lebanese Arabic a bit, but I want to speak with friends in the new year.

But I don't work a lot with Arabic.

I also want to say to you all, Thank you for listening to me and I want you all to have a nice and happy new year.

Thank you!

So why was Arabic so hard for me?

I think it is for a couple of reasons that I probably could have figured out if I put enough effort in. I hope that you can read these before you start your learning journey to help you do better than I did.

1. It is a completely different alphabet which makes reading more difficult and virtually eliminated one source of learning for me.

I like to read in my target languages to get more input. This really helps me with understanding and I usually like to read out loud to practice pronunciation. With a new alphabet, I could only read short phrases without help. This was a similar situation with Mandarin, but I LOVED watching Chinese t.v. shows, so I ended up getting a lot of input there.

2. I took too long deciding which dialect I wanted to focus on.

I started with the Modern Standard dialect to establish a base that might be common between all dialects. Then around 6 months in, I chose to focus on Gulf varieties, which didn't last long. Finally, around month 9 I think, I stuck with Lebanese Arabic, as I knew more people who spoke that dialect. Unfortunately, I didn't end up reaching out to any of these people 😞.

3. I didn't find learning resources that really engaged me and kept me interested.

Most of my learning really felt like work and not much fun, so it was hard to keep going every day.

4. I didn't schedule regular lessons or conversation times with native Arabic speakers.

Because of this, I rarely practiced speaking. So whenever I did speak, it was super challenging and not natural at all. I feel like maybe I learned a lot of vocabulary over the course of the year, but putting it all together was really tough.

5. I took on a new role at my job.

While this is great news, and I am so happy I did, it definitely cut into my energy and motivation to learn Arabic. I just had a lot of other things on my mind that I felt were more important.

So where does this leave me now?

Well, as for now, I'm putting Arabic on the back-burner. I really miss Mandarin and French so I plan to incorporate those languages more into my daily routines, and I still need to advance my Spanish. I'm also starting a 2020 experiment in a new language, so look out for that post coming soon to learn more about it.

I think I will get back to Arabic in a couple of years, hopefully before I go visit around there?

If you are a Lebanese Arabic speaker and would like to set up a monthly chat to help me maintain what I have learned, please comment below and we can set something up.

Thanks for sticking with me through this journey. On to the next language for 2020!