Arabic Learning Tools

I keep a little book in which I write words from class. It’s different than my class notebook. My teacher would say I depend on it too heavily, and he’s right, but I still love it. Every week I put these words into a flashcard set and import it into Rapid Rote. I’m gonna start posting them here. I also collect the words by theme (econ, politics, security, culture, etc) and I’ll post those periodically. If someone wants to get Roula to record them, that’d be happy. I have no wasta in the lab. Week 28 Words and Week 29 Words

I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 over the weekend and apparently the Al-Kitaab downloads are broken. If you used to have access and now don’t let me know…I’ll try to fix it tonight.

Update

It should be fixed now.

I’ve started another blog (this one I’m keeping kinda Arabic-centric) about admin/logistics stuff in the Foreign Service, like buying a house on per diem or flying business class on PCS orders. I’m trying to write a couple of posts a week and am open to other contributors, too. Check it out here.

FSI has several licences for the Rapid Rote (aka Before You Know It) software that they hand out on the six-CD collection for students. Problem is, the licenses are all for Windows. This makes Jeremy angry (I’m ambivalent). He wants FSI to distribute the full Mac version, as well. That’s a good plan, but we all know how long that’ll take. In the meantime, if you use a Mac at home that runs on an Intel chip, try using Wine. Rapid Rote apparently works perfectly in emulation. The install is easy, but there are a few limitations due to the bad copy of X11 that OS X uses.

Unfortunately, I can’t test it for you since I have an old G5. Alternatively, you can install Windows or Linux on your mac using BootCamp or buy Parallels or VMWare Fusion so you can run both Linux (or Windows) at the same time as OS X. Wine works perfectly in Linux. If someone wants to convince the wife to let me buy a new laptop, I’ll try it and post a video.

I complained earlier about the stupid keyboard layout that PCs use in Arabic. It may make sense to someone who grew up using it or is a native speaker, but for someone just learning the language it makes no sense. Well, I wrote a little program that fixes it a bit. Basically, you go to this webpage and type in the text box and your type will come out as if it were the Mac QWERTY style. It should work on any PC without installation. You can then cut and paste to get it in a document. Basically, the keys give the closest phonetic match to your letter so you only have to remember five exceptions or so. Play around with it and see if it works for you. There are a few bugs, but the code is in Javascript, so if you want to see what a bad programmer I am, just view the source. To vowel, press and release the Ctrl key and then the a, i, or u to get fatha, kesra, and damma respectively. I’ll try to post a keymap later. If you find this useful, let me know and I’ll work out the kinks.

I’ve been pretty dissatisfied with online Arabic-English dictionaries. Too often, they don’t offer enough context to know if it’s the right meaning of the word (or maybe a homonym), let alone any form-ey goodness to help you figure out some مصدر   or اسم الفعل   at all. So, I was happy to run back to an old friend: Wiktionary. By searching on the main, English page using a tri-lateral root (try سلم, for example). It serves as a good cross-check for Google translation, in a pinch. For a good number of words, you can also search in English and see if they have an Arabic entry on the “In Other Languages” sidebar.

In case you haven’t logged in to see it, I now have Al Kitaab Units 5-13 available and the Alif Baa answer key. Huzzah.

I’ve also been doing a bit of dorking around this week. I’m about to update my Metro times to SMS application to also do trip planning  so you know when you have to leave to get someplace on time, etc. I also wrote an app that emulates the Mac Arabic QWERTY keyboard for any computer, but since I don’t have a PC to test it on I’ll hold off on putting a link up for that until later this week. Hopefully that’ll help you long suffering PCers in your quest to type in Arabic in a way that doesn’t take ten years and cause huge headaches.

I know that this has absolutely nothing to do with Arabic, but maybe it’s a quality of life improvement.

Last night I was getting kinda pissy after four straight weeks of major red line delays. There are few things that piss me off more than waiting 20 minutes for the next train to carry me back from Virginia. Sure, metro has a system that works if you have internet on your phone, but what about the 95% of us that only have text messaging? Some people had already made an SMS solution, but despite sending a bunch of emails to it I never got so much as a pip back from the services. I think it must have been based on the NextBus system that went bye-bye. Anyway, I stayed up late on Sunday and hacked together a solution that works for me and thought I’d share it.

My solution

All you have to do is send a text message to metro [at] sixpica [dot] com that has the station name in the body and it’ll message you back the next trains coming and their arrival times. You don’t even have to put the whole thing in, it recognizes “va sq” as “Virginia Square-GMU” and “china” as “Gallery Pl-Chinatown. Of course, it works best if you put in the first word or two of the station name, but play around with it and let me know if it does something funny.

You can also put what line you want to get on and it’ll give you only those results for the stations. Just use the two-letter code Metro uses (RD, YL, BL, GR, OR) before the station name. If you choose lines that share tracks (green and yellow, orange and blue) it’ll give you results for both, so in town trips come back in one query [ex: "gn chinatown" would get you both yellow and green lines in both directions].

Anyway, try it out and see if it’s useful. I put the time it checked the Metro system in the message, so you can compare it to when it actually gets sent back. It sometimes takes as long as two minutes to bounce back. I’m looking into whether I can hack something like the trip planner together or at least the bus schedules. I’ll keep you posted.

Update: Ok, so TrainChecker.com does work (and I added a link to them above). I like the way they format the times and might switch to that, but I tried to do some alternate spellings and they didn’t work at all. “Chinatown” and “va sq” both returned errors. The have a three-letter code to memorize for each station, but I can’t be bothered.

Hey look! A benefit from someone actually reading this! Jeremy C. has at least two important characteristics that are different than mine. 1. He’s a pretty smart guy, and 2. He works really, really hard. See, I do these things to help me keep pace with people like him while maintaining my general slothy-ness, but not him. To drive home that point, he sent me this email 30 minutes before the start time of his OWN birthday party. Fortunately, he’s shared some of the following stuff which looks really useful:

Language Instruction

GLOSS – DoD puts a lot of their materials online so that people can keep working on it while they’re in the field. For Arabic, materials start at about the 2 level, and say what topics they’re discussing while also explaining new grammar points in the exercises. Topics include security, economy, etc. They also have other languages, so I’ll be using this to make sure I can hold on to my scores, too.

Reading Comprehension

WordChamp – أستاذة مهى is all about this site, and we’d use it in her class to help us read news articles online. That was rotation 2, and we weren’t quite at a level to really understand. I basically ended up cheating more than I was learning. Just tried it again on Jeremy’s rec, and like it a lot.

Listening Comprehension

ArabicPod - Two Londoners (San Diegoans?) have a series of listening exercises that cover some more normal things, like ordering coffee or paying a check. You can search by topic or difficulty level, and they include a transcript. They produce about two scripts a week. It looks like you have to pay for some of this, but worth checking out. My guess is that a fair amount of it is in colloquial, but who knows from where.

Dictionaries

Since I know better than impugn the good name of Hans in a public setting, I’ll let Jeremy’s words cover this:

Most useful online dictionaries: Nastik and Sakhr
Nastik is good for looking up random words because its lexicon is more modern and a bit wider.  However, its results might not give you the word that you need, since it’s a one-to-one dictionary (i.e. you may get a false cognate or a homonym or an obscure response).  Sakhr is great for looking up stuff based on the اوزان.  Its only drawback is that its lexicon is not quite as modern.  Neither dictionary does compound words.   Hans beats them both coming from Arabic, but they’re the best I know for getting from English to Arabic.

Oh good. He repents at the end there. Phew. I tend to use Google, with mixed results. ALWAYS cross check in Hans Wehr to make sure you’re getting the right meaning and not a homonym or odd meaning. I don’t like my Hans to get to cozy with the Oxford dictionary, so I’ll be using both of these.

Thanks Jeremy, and happy birthday!

You’ll notice some nice little tabs at the top that lead to the file archives. I’ll try to keep those up-to-date with the rest of this. Unless you’re signed in as an approved user, the Al-Kitaab tab will be an empty page. I’ve also uploaded the first batch of RapidRote cards. Check out the RapidRote page under the Lab Materials tab. The first bundle is a 25-set batch, covering Al-Kitaab units 11-20, some rotation 3 (PolMil, Econ, Security) vocab. When possible, I took the cards with the recorded word on there. It’s an 11.8 MB .zip file, and probably has some 400 words over all the different sets. Enjoy.