TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

[Karavinka]

Very unfortunately I've fallen sick, just when I have to deal with all the chores re the residence permit.

I was fine in the -20C cold back at home, but here 0C seemed like really warm so I didn't care enough about the warm clothes.

I've taken a day off for tomorrow, and if I don't feel too sick I'll eat out at a Syrian cafe just next to my house, and try to chat with the stuff. (Enough with the shyness!)

I can definitely relate to this. And before you realize, you fall sick. I hope you get better.

[voron]

And here is my shiny new set of subs2srs'ed Anki cards, based on the series Bidun Qayd (click for full view):


Looks pretty awesome, and it seems like I can make out all the words (or at least make out enough to be able to look them up in the dictionary -- although I am not sure I should do it, at least not for every unknown word).

I tried it with a video clip first, but it didn't look good on Ankidroid: the video opens full screen, but I want to be able to replay it and see the translation at the same time -- so I opted for screenshots.

I'll perhaps play with the settings to make the screenshots larger, and move the audio button down below the video. Otherwise the whole process was easy and fast.

I hope you get better.

Thanks! I stayed in bed almost all day today, still have quite a bad cough but I hope I'll be alright tomorrow.

[vijayjohn]

I'm curious, when foreign movies are dubbed into Arabic, do they use MSA or dialects? (in which case there might be several versions)

It seems to be pretty complicated.

I get the impression that most foreign media content that's dubbed into Arabic is broadcast by the Middle East Broadcasting Center or MBC, a Saudi company but with its headquarters in Dubai. My understanding is that there is a lot of pressure from Arabic-speakers themselves to use MSA in dubbing foreign media, and apparently, Disney has chosen to dub Frozen for this reason in MSA rather than in Egyptian (I think Cairene?) Arabic like their other movies. Latin American telenovelas are also dubbed in MSA. However, not only Disney movies but also The Simpsons (for example) are dubbed in Egyptian Arabic. Turkish TV serials are dubbed in very slow but clear Damascene Arabic, and according to what I seem to remember from The Arabic Student (though I can't find the exact page), they're a useful resource if you're learning that variety and want to improve your listening comprehension. Bollywood movies are dubbed in Kuwaiti Arabic, and Korean dramas are dubbed in Hijazi Arabic; both of these choices are highly unpopular even among native speakers of these varieties.

Here's a paper on this stuff if you're interested: http://article.sciencepublishinggroup.c ... 203.11.pdf.

When I was growing up, Malayalam movies were very commonly subtitled in MSA and sometimes also in English. At points when the dialogue itself was in English, subtitles would only be displayed in MSA. Unfortunately, movies at the time did a really bad job of displaying the subs because they were almost always in faded yellow or white print that all too frequently blended into the background. Here's an example where the subtitles (exclusively in MSA) seem barely legible at all, and I'm pretty sure the subtitle for the first line is just gibberish:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_1KKXofSSU

[voron]

Long time no update!

I've been kind of busy with relocation and stuff (I had to go back to Belarus, but going to return to Turkey again soon), so I had suspended any language studies and resumed them just recently.

I'm now left with 2 Anki decks: the Quran and the بدون قيد series, and I've been adding cards to them and practising them. (Yes I even got rid of my Kurdish deck, because it had no sound and it was boring).

[voron]

Feels good to use the Kurdish flag here again. I just binge watched 10 episodes of the Kurdish series "Jan", which is like 6 hours of watching. Kurdish I've not given up on you. It's hard to learn this language because nobody speaks the standard and there are no materials for the dialects, but I believe I'll speak it well one day.

[Antea]

I'm now left with 2 Anki decks: the Quran and the بدون قيد series, and I've been adding cards to them and practising them. (Yes I even got rid of my Kurdish deck, because it had no sound and it was boring).

And do you read it directly from Arabic, or in Arabic with the translation written below, or do you try to read it in Arabic first and try to understand the meaning, and afterwards go to the translation?

[voron]

I'm now left with 2 Anki decks: the Quran and the بدون قيد series, and I've been adding cards to them and practising them. (Yes I even got rid of my Kurdish deck, because it had no sound and it was boring).

And do you read it directly from Arabic, or in Arabic with the translation written below, or do you try to read it in Arabic first and try to understand the meaning, and afterwards go to the translation?

For the Quran cards, I see the Arabic text and hear the recording, and I try to remember what it means. The back of the card shows the translation.
For the Bidun Qayd cards, I only hear the recording (because I couldn't find the Arabic text), and see a screenshot from the film, but the screenshot is only for fun. I try to remember the meaning. The back of the card shows the translation.

Here are my cards, where the horizontal line separates the front and the back of the card.

[voron]

Btw I'm going to drop Bidun Qayd cards too.

Yeah I know I'm not consistent, but then I have an excuse that I started Anki only recently, and I'm still looking for the best ways for me to use it. For example I love my Quran cards and they are going to stay.

The reason for dropping Bidun Qayd is that the language in it is too unclear and colloquial. I'm thinking about using the Syrian dubbing of the Magnificent Century series instead, with the English subtitles. The language in the dubbing seems to be much clearer.

[Antea]

Btw I'm going to drop Bidun Qayd cards too.

Yeah I know I'm not consistent, but then I have an excuse that I started Anki only recently, and I'm still looking for the best ways for me to use it. For example I love my Quran cards and they are going to stay.

The reason for dropping Bidun Qayd is that the language in it is too unclear and colloquial. I'm thinking about using the Syrian dubbing of the Magnificent Century series instead, with the English subtitles. The language in the dubbing seems to be much clearer.

I don’t use the Anki system, so I don’t make cards. I just try to remember the meaning of words from its original context. But the problem is that in some larger context, like when reading the Quran, it becomes difficult. Because it’s like I am doing a translation of the words I don’t know, but then I lose the meaning of the whole sentence

[Karavinka]

Btw I'm going to drop Bidun Qayd cards too.

Yeah I know I'm not consistent, but then I have an excuse that I started Anki only recently, and I'm still looking for the best ways for me to use it. For example I love my Quran cards and they are going to stay.

The reason for dropping Bidun Qayd is that the language in it is too unclear and colloquial. I'm thinking about using the Syrian dubbing of the Magnificent Century series instead, with the English subtitles. The language in the dubbing seems to be much clearer.

I prefer dubbings for that reason. They're recorded in a studio with people who are trained to do that job. At least from the beginner-intermediate level, dubs work better than something recorded live.

Keep experimenting! A tool is a tool and it's up to the user to find clever ways to use it to meet their needs.

[voron]

I've created Anki cards with sub2srs out of a song. Turned out pretty awesome:


The song is this (Egyptian dialect):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE3yaJcOp28

It's interesting that I know almost every word from the song, but when I heard it for the first time I couldn't understand nearly anything. It reminds me how important it is for me to improve listening comprehension at this stage.

It makes it really easy to use sub2srs if a video has subtitles in both Arabic and English, for example like this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5AHhkVIxYY
It then becomes a matter of several minutes to turn it into Anki cards with images and audio. I wish it became the standard for music videos (and films too!) to include subtitles.

Keep experimenting! A tool is a tool and it's up to the user to find clever ways to use it to meet their needs.

Thanks! That's what I do.

From my experiments so far I've drawn one conclusion: for me, a card without sound is a dead card. Sound is the king.

[voron]

Today I did this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejvpVhvKesM

It took me 1.5 hours.
1 hour to create subtitles and create Anki cards with sub2srs (I used this program - http://www.aegisub.org/ - for the first time, there was a learning curve so I hope it'll be faster next time).
0.5 hours to go through the cards and understand the structure of sentences.

Usually I'm not ready to spend so much time for just 20 unique lines. Perhaps creating subtitles from scratch is a bad idea -- I'll try again and see. Also, perhaps I shouldn't do the Egyptian dialect after all, given that it's harder to understand and analyze.

I learnt one useful thing though. In this sentence:
عمّال بحكيله واشكيله واشرح وأعيد

عمّال seems to be the continuous aspect marker, just like the Syrian عم.
عمّال بحكي - I'm telling

[voron]

I'm proud of myself.

I was listening to my favourite Kurdish radio station (http://kurtceradyodinle.com/radyo-hevi-dinle.html). They usually play songs in Kurmanji, but today they put a Zaza song, and I was able to immediately recognize that it's Zaza, thanks to my short Zaza studies.

Here's the song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UG7hbZYWxts

UPD: And wow, I just googled and found the lyrics too, with Turkish translation:
https://lyricstranslate.com/tr/savana-ne-diyor.html

There are actually quite a lot of Zaza songs for which you can find lyrics and Turkish translation. Nice material for studying (if I ever...).

[voron]

Seems like I've found an easy way of creating Anki cards.

I search for youtube videos using search words like "Best Arabic songs 2017" (in English or Arabic), and then in the "Filter" menu select the "Subtitles" option -- it only gives me videos with subtitles. Then I download the video and the subtitle file, plug them into the sub2srs program -- and voila! There are quite a lot of cool subtitled songs in different dialects.

When the subtitles are available in only one language (which is most often the case), there is one extra step of finding them in the other language and copy-paste into the .srt file, but when one subtitle file already has all the timings, it's a piece of cake. The whole thing takes 10 mins at most.

Today I added this children's song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It220r6DyfE
Video with subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSg0-NI38nY

And a card sample:


Awesome, no?

[voron]

Studying Arabic only. To my two decks (Quran and songs), I've added another one, which I downloaded from here:
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1426585845

It's audios from GLOSS processed with the sub2srs program. Looks like a wonderful study material. They are all Levantine, mostly Syrian.

Chatted with someone in Syrian Arabic on whatsapp, I was ok, could express most of what I wanted to say without even having to use the dictionary. Speaking is way harder... and my main problem is listening comprehension. And I avoid watching unsubtitled Syrian videos because I understand so little and it frustrates me.

[voron]

Now that my Anki routine has more or less stabilized, I should perhaps set an Anki-based goal just like Karavinka does, to make myself a bit more motivated.

I can't use the number of added cards as a goal because they are auto generated (I already have 1000+ cards but 75% of them are unseen), so my goal will be 1000 "seen" (i.e. in learning or mature state) cards by May 15. That's about 25 cards per day. Let's see if I can do it.

All of my cards are for Arabic (3 decks: Quran, songs and GLOSS).

Today's "seen" card number: 279
Goal: 1000 by May 15.

[voron]

I added this nice children's song to Anki
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RecJjzgCLUk

كلن عندن سيارات وجدي عندو حمار - They all have cars, and my granddad has a donkey

This Middle Eastern sympathy for this animal reminded me of this Turkish song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1lGR0LC_2s

Seni çok çok özledim arkadaşım eşek - I miss you so much, donkey my friend

Update on the number of "seen" cards: 432/1000
Looks like I'm doing alright towards meeting my goal...

[voron]

Goal: 1000 by May 15.

Pfff not anymore! I am giving up on this. It's boring and stressful to have a deadline - I have enough of them at work. I want to be relaxed and have fun, and not feel guilty when I skip a day or two.

A new song I've added to Anki:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Qe4fJe ... p=drivesdk

[vijayjohn]

Goal: 1000 by May 15.

Pfff not anymore! I am giving up on this. It's boring and stressful to have a deadline - I have enough of them at work. I want to be relaxed and have fun, and not feel guilty when I skip a day or two.

+1. This is kind of my general approach to life.

[voron]

The Anki routine seems to be working. I feel like I can recognize more words when I read a text in Levantine Arabic.

I'll keep using this Anki-centric approach to increase my vocabulary until ... when? Perhaps when reaching a certain number of cards, like Karavinka does. Or perhaps when I get bored. Or perhaps when reading gets easier - we'll see.

What's next? I want to use TV series: Turkish ones dubbed into the Syrian dialect - there are plenty - or original Arabic ones, to improve my listening comprehension. I'll just try binge watching them, but if it turns to be too hard, I'll ankify them with sub2srs and try to parse sentence by sentence.

And somewhere at that point, I want to start talking. It's going to be hard first, but if my listening comprehension is good enough, I should be able to keep conversations going.