Persian, Arabic, and Turkish, three
languages from the Middle East. Today, I want to talk about my experience
with these languages, some of the things to watch for if you want to learn
these languages, some of the reasons to learn these languages, some of the
mistakes that I made and so forth. The reason I want to talk about this
is because the other day I met someone actually from Cyprus, he was actually
Armenian, but he spoke Greek, he spoke Turkish, and so I tried to say something
in Greek and I couldn't, and I couldn't say very much in Turkish and it reminded
me that, uh, back in 2017 or 2018, I visited Crete, then I was in Israel and
I was in Jordan before going to Crete. I spent six months. I was studying Greek and I was
able to converse while I was on Crete and I had a great time. Hebrew was impossible. I didn't have enough time to really
get anywhere in the language. And then Jordan, when we visited Jordan,
I decided I want to learn Arabic. So since that time I have been working
on Arabic, came back to Vancouver. And I've said this before, there's
so many Iranian immigrants here. I decided to also learn Persian. And while at it, I figured I may as well
get a real sense of the whole Middle East. I'll also do. Turkish, because if you look at a map
of the world, the whole of almost like Central Asia down to, you know, the
Arabian Peninsula going through Iran, that is a large part of the world,
historically, very important part of the world, very much in the news today. I would like to learn those languages. And then I said to myself, you
know, Greek, I've forgotten it all. I went back to Greek, did a bit of Greek
on LingQ and realized that Greek is a lot. easier than Arabic and Persian. And so the first thing I wanted to say was
the biggest difficulty for me in learning Arabic and Persian is the writing system. It goes from right to left where
I'm not familiar with the letters. There's a variety in the
forms of the letters. And all of a sudden I looked at
Greek, which goes from left to right. The letters are more similar
to the Latin alphabet. It was just a lot easier. And a major difficulty
is a writing system. It has always been that way
for me because I like to read. And of course, uh, while I made three
sort of exit videos in Persian, Arabic, and Turkish, after my initial exposure
to those languages, I decided to drop Turkish because I could read it. It was easier to learn. I wanted to focus entirely
on the writing system. Alright, now let's talk a little
bit about the writing system. I would say I made a number of
mistakes, fundamental mistakes. First was, I shouldn't have tried
to learn three languages at once. It's simply too difficult. Even after I dropped Turkish, Persian
and Arabic are two different languages. Within Arabic you have Levantine
Arabic, which is where I'm spending most of my time now. You have Egyptian Arabic,
you have Standard Arabic. There's a lot of different things there. So to try to take on three
languages was not a good move. I would have been much
better off to focus on one. Another mistake I made, I
relied on listening and reading. So using LingQ, I can
hear the word pronounced. I can hear, I can even study
sentence by sentence and hear the natural voice of that sentence. And I was relying too much on the audio. And so I would almost, I wouldn't
say guess, but I sort of, I've jumped to conclusions as to what the word
was, relying on what I had heard. And I wasn't really close to
how those letters are formed. And therefore I wasn't reading very well
and it remained difficult for me to read. So I have now decided and I have
started to write on my computer. And I think dictation is a wonderful
thing to do in language learning, but I'm not yet at a stage where I can
actually listen to something and write it. But in LingQ, when I'm studying in
sentence mode, I can edit the sentence, I go in to edit the sentence, I put
on my Arabic keyboard or my Persian keyboard, and then I look at, and maybe
even listen to, the sentence, and then I try to write the first two, three
words, and I check to see how I did. And in doing that, I'm discovering,
I'm discovering more about the writing system, the mere fact of having to write. It would be better if I wrote
by hand, but I think I wouldn't be able to read my own writing. So at least this way I'm learning
to write on the computer. I'm learning how to form certain words
because it's not always obvious, you know, which of those letters on the keyboard is
going to come out looking, you know, in what form when you put the word together. So all of these things I'm learning. So I'm doing that, and I think
that's going to help me improve in my reading ability, which maybe will
make that obstacle of the writing system a lesser problem for me. But I do believe that it was a mistake. If all these years, and we're talking
years, that I've been working with Persian and Arabic, if I had put
that effort into writing up front, I think I would have been better off. And I say that because I know
that when I learned Chinese. We had to write, we had to write by
hand, and I learned Chinese in a year to a very high level of proficiency. I am nowhere near that level of
proficiency in my Arabic or Persian. Now, Chinese I was doing
seven, eight hours a day. Here I'm going one hour, an hour and
a half a day, so it's not comparable. And I had an opportunity
to speak to people. I had my teachers that I could speak
to over lunch and so forth and so on. And here I have very little opportunity
to speak to people unless I set up a conversation with someone online. So, mistake number one, doing
three languages at the same time. Mistake number two, not starting to write. I'm not a fan of speak from
day one, but I think I am a fan now of write from day one. So I very much recommend, even if
it's a strange writing system, on the computer you have keyboards for
all these different writing systems. It's painful at first, and perhaps the
way I'm doing it now at LingQ, where I'm looking at a sentence, a short bit of
text, it's And I'm writing that sentence out and eventually I hope to be able to do
dictation and, and get a better, you know, more granular feel for the writing system. I think that's going to help me. So that was a major problem. But you know, I also want to say when
it comes to problems and my relative lack of success, although I'm further
along in Persian than I am in Arabic. In a way, it doesn't
detract from my enjoyment. And I think that's a third
element that we have to consider. We don't always make as much, you
know, progress as we would like. Romanian was very easy because the
language is so similar to Italian. Greek was certainly easier than Arabic. Persian is easier than Arabic. Not every language is going
to be equally difficult. Very much depends on the
languages you already know. But if you can enjoy what you're doing. So right now I am enjoying,
surprisingly, late. Writing in Persian and Arabic, really
learning how the writing system works. I think I should have plowed into
the writing system earlier, but now that I'm doing it, I'm enjoying it. So I do enjoy, you know, what I've
learned about those three languages, discovered how those languages work. Also, because I was learning
those three languages. Partly out of a motivation to learn more
about the history of the Middle East. I have done a lot of reading
about the history of the Middle East in English, granted. And so I'm much more
familiar with that area. And of course, that makes you more
familiar with some of the background to what's happening in that area today. And, and it is, you know, if you look
at a map of the world, if humans all migrated from Africa, then obviously
one of the first places they would have gone to is the Middle East. The Middle East is a key sort of juncture
connecting sort of Africa, Asia, Europe. It's a very important part of the world. Uh, I think we have a tendency, no
matter where we live, to think that our little area is the center of the world. But if any place is the center of the
world, I think it's the Middle East. Central Asia, that area, of course,
the earliest civilizations were in the Middle East, Sumer and Akkad,
the first large empire in the world, well, perhaps China as well, but even
earlier was the Persian Empire, the first monotheistic religion, not that,
in my opinion, monotheistic religions are superior to polytheistic religions,
they are very influential in the world. Monotheistic religions and,
uh, Zoroastrian was the first monotheistic religion. Uh, it is said, I'm not a, you know,
historical expert and, uh, Abraham, you know, the founder of the Abraham
connected religions, in other words, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He came from that part of the world. Of course, writing came
from the Phoenicians. No, I shouldn't say writing. The Chinese have a writing system. American continent developed
the writing system. Indian civilizations had a writing system. But. The most popular writing systems
in the world, the most widely used, if we consider China as a special
case, because it's one country unto itself, the Arabic writing system,
the Greek writing system, the Cyrillic alphabet, the Latin alphabet, they
all came from the Phoenician alphabet. So, so many things in the world
originated in the Middle East. I feel kind of privileged that I
can be learning the languages and I could throw Greek in there as well. Of that part of the world. So, you know, I, I don't consider that
the time that I've spent for relatively little success in learning the language
is in any way a negative, and I also enjoy what I'm doing with the language,
but I have to find a way to enjoy it. I can't keep beating against a brick
wall where it's particularly in Arabic. There are so many words to learn
and the grammar is complicated and I'm still not particularly fluent. And of course, I'm not in an
environment where I can speak. I think I have enough
of a level in Arabic. That if I went to Lebanon or somewhere
where I could easily meet people and converse that I would very quickly develop
a fairly decent level in the language. I do have a large passive vocabulary,
but I just can't speak very well. And maybe we need to be realistic. And maybe I wasn't being very realistic. You can learn languages
to a certain level. A certain passive level, but in
order to speak them well, at some point, you have to have lots of
opportunity to speak that language. And I have had lots of opportunity
to use my Japanese, my Chinese, my European languages, doing business
in Europe and so forth and so on. And without that opportunity,
you can only go so far. We can't really control how quickly we
can learn the language or the success we're going to have in the language. We can enjoy the level of enjoyment that
we derive from learning the language. And as long as we are enjoying the period
of time that we are, you know, engaged with the language, that's good enough. And the progress will take care of itself. It will happen at times
we aren't aware of it. At times we have moments where
we feel good about ourselves. And then at other moments, as was the case
now with my Greek, which I've almost lost, I feel I could very quickly recover it. But whatever you're doing with
the language, if you can enjoy while you're doing it, I think
that's the ultimate thing. And maybe we have to, you know, guard
ourselves against having unrealistic plans or unrealistic expectations. And I guess insofar as what I thought
I would be able to achieve in those three languages, I wasn't being
very realistic, but I'm nevertheless very satisfied that I did put the
time in and that I am where I am. But I could have done it a lot better. So I'll leave you the couple
of videos that it did, where I talk about my experience with
these languages in the past. Thank you for listening. Bye for now.