I might know what you mean. My brain likes to play hide the dictionary, and at those times there's just no link between word and meaning. I can even repeat what I've heard, or read out writing, yet still have no idea what I'm saying. If I'm trying to talk at the time, I just stop and point or mime for a bit. And I could never take notes in class, because I had to keep concentrating on what I was hearing.

But onto the good news (maybe). If your issue is language-independent, then your target language being very different might not be such a problem. The differences might even be helpful.

I started learning Japanese last year. I actually wanted to learn Mandarin but, also like you, the thought of processing the tones put me off (at the time). I thought, though, that if I start with the alphabets and the kanji and focus on reading first, then I'll have plenty of time to get used to the sounds, and since the kanji are in large part derived from Chinese, I'll have a head start when I switch targets later. I've accepted that I might never be a great conversationalist—I'm not in my first language either—but I fully intend to at least be a competent reader and writer, which is more transferable to Mandarin, I think, since the meanings seem to be more preserved than the pronunciations.

Right now, I'm still on target to finish the 2000-ish regular-use kanji in June. While I study those, I listen to Japanese songs which I've found the lyrics and their translations for. I keep them in my playlist until I know every word, which provides a kind of precognition of what comes next that doesn't always exist in conversations. At first, it was only Yoasobi and Riria that had clear enough singing for me to follow along, but over the hundreds? of hours of listening, my brain's definitely developed because I can manage quite a few others too now.

Something clicked about a month ago where everything started feeling easier. Not quite just easy (yet?) but definitely markedly less difficult. I wasn't expecting that. I never got that with the 6 and 9 years of other language learning in school, but then I've probably put more into this than school provided for those. I'm not going to patronisingly say that if I can do this then you can too, because I don't know how we differ, but I will suggest that maybe you're being a little pessimistic about paths you haven't fully explored.

That confidence boost I got made me rethink the Chinese tones. Of the videos trying to explain it, I found Mandarin Chinese TONES GUIDE That Schools Don't Teach You the most helpful. I haven't had the time to really practice, but since last year I've gained the belief that it's not some impossible hurdle. It is going to take a lot of listening to get there, though.

So I suppose what I'm saying is give it a try because you won't really know until you've given it a really good go, and don't use school experience as the basis for judgement because you can set yourself a very different curriculum.

Yeah, I don't know what happened with my fingers there. I'm still learning the layout but having the first two letters you taught on the index fingers made those easy to learn to type. I even chose ت for the example specifically because it's the same key as ـ and I am super lazy efficient when it comes to typing. However, I do remember I didn't make the text nice and big first; at the normal size, without the other alongside for comparison, ت ن .

It's right in Anki, though. One of the other advantages of custom notes is editing the styling so the letters are literally ten times as large. And if it had been wrong, a single correction would have fixed all eight cards.

Do you have the same problem with your first language?

Completely agree with this. Anki isn't perfect, but if you ever find anything better, I want to know what it is.

Getting started with "Basic" or "Basic (and reversed card)" notes is almost as easy as writing on each side of a physical card, but if you find yourself repeating information—either exactly or with the same kind of variations—it's well worth looking at making your own note types.

For example, following each Arabic lesson, I was adding each letter into Anki. I wanted to recognise the different forms so, at first, I had 4 notes for each letter:—

ن ⇄ t

تـ ⇄ t (initial)

ـتـ ⇄ t (medial)

ـت ⇄ t (final)

With cards generated for both directions, that's 8 cards, but also eight bits of typing.

Once I recognised the pattern, I made a new note type with "Letter" and "Transliteration" fields. Now I only need to add two things, but I still get eight cards automatically generated by Anki for each letter. Okay, I needed to create some card templates too, but the modifications weren't more complicated than adding "ـ" before/after the Arabic letter (to produce each of the different forms) and " (medial)" etc. after the transliteration. This was about two minutes' work, and it only had to be spent once, but now all the remaining letters can make use of it, saving much more time over all.

And if I'd been really lazy, I could have just downloaded any of the published decks.

The other thing I'd say is: it's very easy to overdo things at the start before the gaps between reviews have been filled in. So start slow and keep your learning queue under control. If it starts growing and growing, stop the new cards completely, reduce the queue, and then restart the new cards with a reduced daily limit.

Is there a typo in the example:—

م + س + ت + ض = مسبض

I count two dots above (ت) on the right, but one dot below (ـبـ) on the left. Making the sides match has two possibilities.

م + س + ت + ض = مستض

م + س + ب + ض = مسبض

I hope the other one is just nonsense and not rude.

That font chart has saved me a question about alternatives to Noto Kufi/Naskh in LibreOffice. I'm going to look for Scheherazade New and its nice clear dots later.

Thanks again, Prof! These are all great answers.

If short vowels aren't always marked, and they modify a preceding letter, does that mean there are no Arabic words that start with them? Or is there a silent consonant like the chosongul/hangul ㅇ used in Korean? Or does everyone just have to learn how to read those words anyway, like with English's bough cough dough ought rough through?

I notice that if we combine حَبيبي (Habiibii) with yesterday's قطر ('aTr), then today's table header عَرَبي —which I guess means Arabic—looks like its transliteration is [something]arabii, which makes me wonder about what that something is. Looking forward to more lessons.

needle shart talons

I can see the gloves for that, but do you need special shorts too?

In the "Hayawaan" transliteration for حَيوان, is the "a" between the "y" and "w" part of "ya", part of "aw", or an implicit third thing?

Thank you! Can I suggest adding a note along the lines of "ث becomes ث‍ in the example"?

I had to do some unicode trickery for that. Do Arabic keyboards have a zero-width joiner key or some other method for forcing particular forms?

And please add me to your ping list.

I realised the problem when I enlarged the text enough to see the dots properly. I'd been expecting to see ث in the final example and misread ب as that. Then the little gap went against my expectation of cursive and I got confused. All the not-Arabic posting had me primed for tech problems, but it's just that I'm not wearing glasses, and the first two examples hadn't forced my left-to-right brain to pay more attention. Sorry to bother you with my idiocy.

So, now that I can actually see, I notice an extra slanted line on top in ثَوب (example) but not in ثوب (reply). What does that do?

P.S., I like the common-shape approach with mnemonics for disambiguation you've used here. I think it's a good way to build familiarity with new writing systems.

deleted by creator

Who can say? But I'd bet on the Vanguard Union of Lao–Việt Assemblies getting rubbed out.

Bloc Of Organized Bolivaran States?

For those needing navigational assistance, it's practically in the middle of the map, just north of the equator. And heed the old advice: if you keep playing with your sextant, you're going to go blind.

Still waiting for someone to find the Chad–Libya Internationalist Territory.

Don't talk to me about mathemisogynists, always talking about identities but conveniently ignoring the ones that challenge any inequality, gaslighting me with an insistence that I'm being irrational and hyperbolic. Justice for polyshedra and polytheydra!

Right, so, the bit of my brain that has been immersed in science is shouting "quackery!" at all the anecdote and hypothesis being asserted as firmly established facts. It may be completely correct—it isn't; there are obvious problems—but it isn't proven, and to write as if it is is misleading, however well intentioned.

You can learn to ride a bike with one hand tied behind your back. You can point to numerous children who have done exactly that and say "See?" But to then suggest that everyone absolutely should learn to do it that way, and that using both hands first is somehow harmful to learning cycling—since it leads to a less-refined sense of balance or something—is to draw a dubious conclusion from verifiable observations.

Now, I still think a lot of the ideas presented are useful, particularly for less-confident learners. For example, for folks easily put off by making any mistakes, avoiding feedback mechanisms with an extended familiarisation period seems like it would be quite beneficial. Demoralisation is incredibly destructive to learning, so methods that help maintain motivation should be encouraged even if they're not ideal. Accepting that mistakes are inevitable and that confronting them should not be a cause for demoralisation might be better, but insisting on that "just git gud" approach is useless if it ends up being off-putting: the alternative of no progress at all is clearly the worse outcome.

And I write this as someone following an alternative approach to language learning, one that is also deprioritising speech, though for different reasons, with less dogmatism, and with less initial emphasis on listening as well. My personal prioritisation is reading, writing, listening, speech. I'm following the comprehensible input approach of taking small steps into unfamiliar territory, but since my target language is Japanese, I see the writing system as more outside my prior experiences than the sounds and, therefore, more in need of initial familiarisation. And, since reading and writing are also less time-sensitive than listening and speech, my reasoning is that they're the easier starting point.

However, I do not subscribe to the thinking-is-bad, just-absorb-it approach, so while I am prioritising reception over production, I'm not purposefully avoiding either writing or speech. In fact, I'm finding that trying to put my thoughts into words is actually very helpful in building a sense of my progress. (A running count of hours or words seems far too abstract.) And while working through the kanji (essentially a 2000+ item vocabulary list) is getting more of my attention than explanations of grammar, I've found that conscious analysis of the language useful as a framework for learning. It's certainly helped having a place for new ideas already marked out before encountering them. That said, the more vocabulary I learn, the more easily the example sentences demonstrate the grammar.

I did try the approach of starting with books for babies and building up from there, but since I do not have the experiences and wants of a baby/child, I found them (aside from a few funny exceptions) generally quite tedious. However, by picking up some understanding of grammar and knowledge of vocabulary, I've been able to turn other sources into comprehensible input, sources that I do actually find engaging, which I agree is key.

So, while I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from using (very useful) immersive approaches, and agree that learning a language is not the same as studying linguistics, I think the stubborn, absolute insistence on delaying certain aspects of learning is misguided, and promoting the notion that you can passively absorb a language because that's what children do—ignoring the plentiful interactions and feedback that kids actually encounter—and because he thinks that's what worked for him individually, strikes me as less than ideal.

But, like I said earlier, if this approach works for you personally, and other approaches do not, then what does it matter whether it is the most efficient? Effectiveness should be the more important consideration.

How often were they allowed to leave?

AmeriKKKa