Not as easy as A, B, C
October 11, 2024 12:04 AM Subscribe
Adult language learners who've tackled a language with a new-to-you script: how did you learn to read it faster and more effectively?
I am hyperlexic re: the Latin alphabet. Which means I never actually was conscious of "learning" to read my first language (English), and I'm able to read other languages that use the Latin alphabet almost as fast as English.
Enter Arabic, specifically classical Arabic, which uses a completely different script AND uses diacritical marks to denote vowels above AND below the letters for consonants. Does anyone remember Toonces the Driving Cat from SNL from 30 years ago? I feel like I'm Toonces behind the wheel when I attempt to read classical Arabic. Half the time my brain "flips" the letters upside down, or I fail to spot a diacritical mark. I can slow down all I want: same thing happens. It feels to me like a form of dyslexia, perhaps.
Does this sound familiar to anyone who's wrangled learning a language written in a different script from the one used by your first language? If so, did you learn specific techniques to cope with it? Or was it just a matter of practice, practice, practice?
I am hyperlexic re: the Latin alphabet. Which means I never actually was conscious of "learning" to read my first language (English), and I'm able to read other languages that use the Latin alphabet almost as fast as English.
Enter Arabic, specifically classical Arabic, which uses a completely different script AND uses diacritical marks to denote vowels above AND below the letters for consonants. Does anyone remember Toonces the Driving Cat from SNL from 30 years ago? I feel like I'm Toonces behind the wheel when I attempt to read classical Arabic. Half the time my brain "flips" the letters upside down, or I fail to spot a diacritical mark. I can slow down all I want: same thing happens. It feels to me like a form of dyslexia, perhaps.
Does this sound familiar to anyone who's wrangled learning a language written in a different script from the one used by your first language? If so, did you learn specific techniques to cope with it? Or was it just a matter of practice, practice, practice?
Response by poster: @lokta yes, at least once a day
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 3:07 AM on October 11
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 3:07 AM on October 11
I have observed someone who taught himself reading kyrillic letters successfully by watching subtitled films/videos and also labelling items around the house with sticky notes. not sure if this works with Arabic.
posted by 15L06 at 4:00 AM on October 11
posted by 15L06 at 4:00 AM on October 11
Or was it just a matter of practice, practice, practice?Basically this, and especially practice with writing by hand.
posted by 4rtemis at 4:00 AM on October 11 [2 favorites]
For me it really was just practice, and specifically practice writing a lot by hand. I was always very good at picking up new scripts because I enjoyed writing in them. I've not learned Arabic, but I've learned Hangeul, Japanese scripts, Cyrillic, and Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja this way.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 5:47 AM on October 11
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 5:47 AM on October 11
Writing practice that requires you to transliterate stuff. Write down names of people in the newspaper, places around you, stops on your commute. Translating words into the new letters makes them stick.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 6:42 AM on October 11 [5 favorites]
posted by I claim sanctuary at 6:42 AM on October 11 [5 favorites]
With Greek, Hangeul, and Cyrillic: keeping a whiteboard next to my desk and writing words or phrases as they popped into my head during the day, which I started doing after discovering that practicing characters by writing them on the shower wall seemed to help things go much more quickly. Size of the result when read back + exaggerated physical movement from writing on a larger scale (+ in the original case, relaxed shower brain) seems to make a difference for me. Best of luck!
posted by notquitemaryann at 6:45 AM on October 11 [4 favorites]
posted by notquitemaryann at 6:45 AM on October 11 [4 favorites]
also writing in a larger size helps diacritics feel more intentional for me vs "uhhhhhh oops I should probably put this here"
posted by notquitemaryann at 6:50 AM on October 11 [1 favorite]
posted by notquitemaryann at 6:50 AM on October 11 [1 favorite]
I recommend learning each letter one at a time, intensively, so that a detail like a missing diacritical mark stands out the same way it stands out when the cross bar is missing from an A. One important step is to learn to recognize and reject letters that are a close match but wrong, as when you compare H with N. You need to also learn to recognize N as "that version of not-H" before you actually learn that that version of not-H is called N, and makes the nnnnn sound. You want to learn your consonant that turns into a vowel with a diacritical mark as a letter that has a false positive. Whenever you see it you rapidly check for the diacritical marks it shouldn't have. If you are not checking you haven't really learned it yet.
I suggest that you get a frequency list and start by the letter that shows up the most often and work your way through the alphabet in that order. That means if you were learning English you'd start with E, not A. A couple of days of writing out the letter, playing spot the letter in text you can't decipher, and deliberately comparing different versions of the letter written in different fonts should make it pop more. Once you have that first letter down firmly, add a second letter and go through your text spotting both of them, and continue writing drill on the first one as well as the second.
Kids go through text in pre-kindergarten doing exercises like "Circle all the E's and put a cross over all the F's" You can do that too. And they usually do a full page of writing out each letter more than once - one in a home work book, one at preschool and one in kindergarten - and of course Sesame Street used to have an entire episode devoted to the letter E. Kids get a lot more repetition and time to learn than you have had.
By the time you picked up reading at the age of three or four you had been exposed to thousands of hours of text in context, while you stared at the can of beans your father was opening and imprinted the brand name, or went past the refinery in the car and saw the letters EXXON, one on each of the big tanks. If you are learning Arabic you are trying to skip that step - unless you are learning Arabic in a country where it is the dominant language on bill boards and food packages. So have patience with yourself.
Find ways to describe the differences verbally. "With the tweaky bit fluttering left like a flag" will turn into the ability to spot "upside down flag" and "either a squished variation on L, or an I with the top missing" When you have words to describe the patterns you are looking at, you will be able to recall and recognize them much more easily than if you are just trying to use your visual memory.
If you were learning the English script you'd start by doing things like automatically dividing letters into categories like "fences" ILEFH and "broken fences" MNVZ and "walls with windows," ODRPA or whatever associations looking at the letters would trigger for you. You want to be thinking in terms of "I dunno what it is, but it's one of those letters," as an early step in learning the individual ones. In preschool that's "circle all the letters that go below the line" and "put a cross on all letters you can write without taking your pencil off the page."
Diacritical marks should be spoken in your head with some kind of a system - up or down or nope, is an obvious one, but you might remember to check every time if you use a different choice of words, such as pepper for a diacritical mark above, sand for a diacritical mark below, and plain for a letter that could have a diacritical mark but doesn't have it this time. You really are going to need to drill yourself by going through pages of nothing but the letter in how ever many variant forms it has, the way that kids go through drill learning to distinguish A, a or E and e, on a page with nothing but those characters, or learn to distinguish b from d and p.
When I was teaching reading the word bed was extremely useful because it was a drawing of a bed, the drawing didn't work if you reversed the two end letters and b comes in the alphabet before d does. If you can come up with similar basic facts to ground yourself with, you'll be creating a foundation.
Kids usually learn to write their own name over and over and over... so do that and the letters in your name will be stuck in your memory and you'll never screw up diacritical marks on those letters. Find a few other key words you can use over and over, and pepper you writing with them. Start every message with the word Hello in Arabic and end it with I love you or Drop dead and die. The people receiving your messages will soon recognize what they mean, as you'll tell them, and they will get used to seeing them and know. Write a list of some type in English every day, but write the day of the week in Arabic at the top of it. It could be your task list or your daily gratitude or whatever. A few habits like this will create some letters you know really really well and never make mistakes on, which will take you far enough to start getting other letters from context. You'll know that letter can't be a Y because you learned Y from writing Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday...
Some people find they can try to associate the symbols used in their target language with faces - this works really well with Korean - and tap into the facial recognition part of their brain. With this type of mnemonic an M will stick in their memory because it's a face with a funny nose or a frowning forehead, and a D will stick in their memory because its a person looking to the right who has no nose, whereas O is the same person looking right at them.
If you are just learning an alphabet, it's not so bad. If you were learning Chinese you'd need to learn to recognize thousands of different buildings, under attack by various types of flying contraptions...
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:56 AM on October 11 [6 favorites]
I suggest that you get a frequency list and start by the letter that shows up the most often and work your way through the alphabet in that order. That means if you were learning English you'd start with E, not A. A couple of days of writing out the letter, playing spot the letter in text you can't decipher, and deliberately comparing different versions of the letter written in different fonts should make it pop more. Once you have that first letter down firmly, add a second letter and go through your text spotting both of them, and continue writing drill on the first one as well as the second.
Kids go through text in pre-kindergarten doing exercises like "Circle all the E's and put a cross over all the F's" You can do that too. And they usually do a full page of writing out each letter more than once - one in a home work book, one at preschool and one in kindergarten - and of course Sesame Street used to have an entire episode devoted to the letter E. Kids get a lot more repetition and time to learn than you have had.
By the time you picked up reading at the age of three or four you had been exposed to thousands of hours of text in context, while you stared at the can of beans your father was opening and imprinted the brand name, or went past the refinery in the car and saw the letters EXXON, one on each of the big tanks. If you are learning Arabic you are trying to skip that step - unless you are learning Arabic in a country where it is the dominant language on bill boards and food packages. So have patience with yourself.
Find ways to describe the differences verbally. "With the tweaky bit fluttering left like a flag" will turn into the ability to spot "upside down flag" and "either a squished variation on L, or an I with the top missing" When you have words to describe the patterns you are looking at, you will be able to recall and recognize them much more easily than if you are just trying to use your visual memory.
If you were learning the English script you'd start by doing things like automatically dividing letters into categories like "fences" ILEFH and "broken fences" MNVZ and "walls with windows," ODRPA or whatever associations looking at the letters would trigger for you. You want to be thinking in terms of "I dunno what it is, but it's one of those letters," as an early step in learning the individual ones. In preschool that's "circle all the letters that go below the line" and "put a cross on all letters you can write without taking your pencil off the page."
Diacritical marks should be spoken in your head with some kind of a system - up or down or nope, is an obvious one, but you might remember to check every time if you use a different choice of words, such as pepper for a diacritical mark above, sand for a diacritical mark below, and plain for a letter that could have a diacritical mark but doesn't have it this time. You really are going to need to drill yourself by going through pages of nothing but the letter in how ever many variant forms it has, the way that kids go through drill learning to distinguish A, a or E and e, on a page with nothing but those characters, or learn to distinguish b from d and p.
When I was teaching reading the word bed was extremely useful because it was a drawing of a bed, the drawing didn't work if you reversed the two end letters and b comes in the alphabet before d does. If you can come up with similar basic facts to ground yourself with, you'll be creating a foundation.
Kids usually learn to write their own name over and over and over... so do that and the letters in your name will be stuck in your memory and you'll never screw up diacritical marks on those letters. Find a few other key words you can use over and over, and pepper you writing with them. Start every message with the word Hello in Arabic and end it with I love you or Drop dead and die. The people receiving your messages will soon recognize what they mean, as you'll tell them, and they will get used to seeing them and know. Write a list of some type in English every day, but write the day of the week in Arabic at the top of it. It could be your task list or your daily gratitude or whatever. A few habits like this will create some letters you know really really well and never make mistakes on, which will take you far enough to start getting other letters from context. You'll know that letter can't be a Y because you learned Y from writing Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday...
Some people find they can try to associate the symbols used in their target language with faces - this works really well with Korean - and tap into the facial recognition part of their brain. With this type of mnemonic an M will stick in their memory because it's a face with a funny nose or a frowning forehead, and a D will stick in their memory because its a person looking to the right who has no nose, whereas O is the same person looking right at them.
If you are just learning an alphabet, it's not so bad. If you were learning Chinese you'd need to learn to recognize thousands of different buildings, under attack by various types of flying contraptions...
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:56 AM on October 11 [6 favorites]
I learned Japanese in my 30s and can read quite fluently now.
In the context of a completely new alphabet, the process looks something like this:
1. Learn the characters and drill them. A lot. Use a flashcard app. It's not going to be easy; for comparison, Japanese's alphabet is around 90 characters in size and that typically takes people a few weeks depending on how hard they go at it.
2. Start learning words in the language. At this stage, you will not actually know the alphabet perfectly. You will, at best, be familiar with the alphabet. You will still forget letters, you will still read it wrong sometimes. The important thing is to continue learning the language (using the alphabet) and keep correcting yourself when you misread them. As you learn words that use those letters, your brain will find it vastly easier to remember the letters themselves.
3. A few thousand hours of reading native material. There's no skipping this; you need to do it to learn the language anyways, so it's not like this is unique to alphabets you're not native with either, but you will be slowed down by the process of dealing with the unfamiliar alphabet. This is normal. Just keep reading. With each hour you will get better, and after tens or hundreds of thousands of self-corrections, you will get good. It might take you literally months to stop confusing the equivalent of "b" and "d"; that's fine. Just keep reading.
Basically, it's less a matter of technique and more a matter of expectations. Don't expect yourself to magically know everything perfectly after 3 weeks. This is a process that is going to take literally years.
posted by etealuear_crushue at 9:33 AM on October 11 [1 favorite]
In the context of a completely new alphabet, the process looks something like this:
1. Learn the characters and drill them. A lot. Use a flashcard app. It's not going to be easy; for comparison, Japanese's alphabet is around 90 characters in size and that typically takes people a few weeks depending on how hard they go at it.
2. Start learning words in the language. At this stage, you will not actually know the alphabet perfectly. You will, at best, be familiar with the alphabet. You will still forget letters, you will still read it wrong sometimes. The important thing is to continue learning the language (using the alphabet) and keep correcting yourself when you misread them. As you learn words that use those letters, your brain will find it vastly easier to remember the letters themselves.
3. A few thousand hours of reading native material. There's no skipping this; you need to do it to learn the language anyways, so it's not like this is unique to alphabets you're not native with either, but you will be slowed down by the process of dealing with the unfamiliar alphabet. This is normal. Just keep reading. With each hour you will get better, and after tens or hundreds of thousands of self-corrections, you will get good. It might take you literally months to stop confusing the equivalent of "b" and "d"; that's fine. Just keep reading.
Basically, it's less a matter of technique and more a matter of expectations. Don't expect yourself to magically know everything perfectly after 3 weeks. This is a process that is going to take literally years.
posted by etealuear_crushue at 9:33 AM on October 11 [1 favorite]
I learned Yiddish and Hebrew very slowly over the course of years, first learning classical Hebrew script and some basics through a workbook and an app, then learning Yiddish through a couple of (non-university) courses. My first year of Yiddish was focused on speaking, so it wasn't until my second year of study that I worked more on reading and writing. Despite having the background knowledge of Hebrew characters, it was a slog for a few years, so that even things written in a very basic level were very slow going and I struggled to write simple words and sentences, doubting myself, flipping letters, and having to go back and fix them. It was also a real struggle to switch between print and script.
Two daily practices have helped: journaling and reading. I started keeping a mostly daily journal with a mix of sketching, vocab I've been trying to learn, and some description using them. For reading, I worked both on at or even below level simple things (children's books have been very helpful) as well as something that was a stretch (but not too much of one), but was a story I was familiar with or had a side-by-side translation to help with reading. For both of those, I read out loud. I don't know if that was essential, but I think it was helpful to me to not let my brain just allow in some fuzz because I couldn't quite figure something out. Somewhere along the way, maybe 6 months in, things really started clicking. I'm nowhere near as fluid a reader or writer as I am in English, but I can make my way more confidently through things and can find my place in a longer piece more easily. I don't flip the characters I used to mix up, though I do still struggle with the script version of a few of the final forms because I use them so infrequently, so that's something I should work on.
So I'd say some of it is just slowly chipping away at it, building up your feel for the letters, getting more and more familiar with common words, phrases, sentences. And I wasn't 100% faithful to my practice. The journaling tends to come in spurts and then I drop it for a while. I'll work my way through a long book, about 15-20 minutes per day, then take a break while I'm figuring out what I want to read next. The picture books I do still ready basically daily because I have a small child who loves to be read to, so that helps keep me on track with those at least. And honestly, that repetition is probably helpful, too (because I both have a limited number of Yiddish language book and kids love to hear the same story multiple times every day for weeks at a time). So someone with more dedication to daily study will likely move more quickly. And I can't say 6 months is exactly; it was more like I noticed that my reading had vastly improved in a new class I was taking and I'd been doing the journal and read aloud stuff and attribute it to that.
posted by carrioncomfort at 10:34 AM on October 11
Two daily practices have helped: journaling and reading. I started keeping a mostly daily journal with a mix of sketching, vocab I've been trying to learn, and some description using them. For reading, I worked both on at or even below level simple things (children's books have been very helpful) as well as something that was a stretch (but not too much of one), but was a story I was familiar with or had a side-by-side translation to help with reading. For both of those, I read out loud. I don't know if that was essential, but I think it was helpful to me to not let my brain just allow in some fuzz because I couldn't quite figure something out. Somewhere along the way, maybe 6 months in, things really started clicking. I'm nowhere near as fluid a reader or writer as I am in English, but I can make my way more confidently through things and can find my place in a longer piece more easily. I don't flip the characters I used to mix up, though I do still struggle with the script version of a few of the final forms because I use them so infrequently, so that's something I should work on.
So I'd say some of it is just slowly chipping away at it, building up your feel for the letters, getting more and more familiar with common words, phrases, sentences. And I wasn't 100% faithful to my practice. The journaling tends to come in spurts and then I drop it for a while. I'll work my way through a long book, about 15-20 minutes per day, then take a break while I'm figuring out what I want to read next. The picture books I do still ready basically daily because I have a small child who loves to be read to, so that helps keep me on track with those at least. And honestly, that repetition is probably helpful, too (because I both have a limited number of Yiddish language book and kids love to hear the same story multiple times every day for weeks at a time). So someone with more dedication to daily study will likely move more quickly. And I can't say 6 months is exactly; it was more like I noticed that my reading had vastly improved in a new class I was taking and I'd been doing the journal and read aloud stuff and attribute it to that.
posted by carrioncomfort at 10:34 AM on October 11
I am going to go out on a limb here and say because you are hyper lexic, your brain just absorbs language on a completely different level than us ordinaries. My suspicion (based on other HL people I’ve observed) is that you see language as a whole, and your brain very quickly grasps the underlying patterns without Any conscious effort. (That capitalized on its own and I’m going to keep it!)
So, in addition to the normal learner approach, I’m going to suggest you try some things that see language as a whole. Like don’t read, sit back and look at a paragraph of writing and take it in as a whole like you would a painting. Really meditate and absorb the “is”-ness of the script like listening to music as a whole, and then when you feel the whole start isolating specific instruments and listening only for the violins or flutes or whatever. Then go back to the whole. Do the same with the script by looking at the various patterns that emerge. I think someone above mentioned watching videos of other people writing it out and that may help too bc you’ll see another brain doing the organizing and that may communicate some additional patterns to your brain. Like when a person dots their i or crosses the t. So maybe brainstorm on exercises like that. Or compare / contrast other related scripts ? See the whole. See the pattern. Feel the flow. (I helped a dyslexic kid with his spelling by breaking up sphaghetti sticks and having him tactically spell out the words, or write them with a stick in the dust. That might not work here but you get the idea.)
I bet that at some point it will just click for you because your brain figured out the various underlying patterns and it will become “obvious” to you at least on a first order (there are always grammar exceptions etc etc). How long will it take I don’t know. You probably underestimate how much your brain was working to absorb English (and then immediately applied to the other pattern related languages).
posted by St. Peepsburg at 10:40 AM on October 11
So, in addition to the normal learner approach, I’m going to suggest you try some things that see language as a whole. Like don’t read, sit back and look at a paragraph of writing and take it in as a whole like you would a painting. Really meditate and absorb the “is”-ness of the script like listening to music as a whole, and then when you feel the whole start isolating specific instruments and listening only for the violins or flutes or whatever. Then go back to the whole. Do the same with the script by looking at the various patterns that emerge. I think someone above mentioned watching videos of other people writing it out and that may help too bc you’ll see another brain doing the organizing and that may communicate some additional patterns to your brain. Like when a person dots their i or crosses the t. So maybe brainstorm on exercises like that. Or compare / contrast other related scripts ? See the whole. See the pattern. Feel the flow. (I helped a dyslexic kid with his spelling by breaking up sphaghetti sticks and having him tactically spell out the words, or write them with a stick in the dust. That might not work here but you get the idea.)
I bet that at some point it will just click for you because your brain figured out the various underlying patterns and it will become “obvious” to you at least on a first order (there are always grammar exceptions etc etc). How long will it take I don’t know. You probably underestimate how much your brain was working to absorb English (and then immediately applied to the other pattern related languages).
posted by St. Peepsburg at 10:40 AM on October 11
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art? via Xu Bing's works (especially square word calligraphy) i gained a greater understanding of the meanings of cjk characters
for arabic, a relevant artist could be Lalla Essaydi [nmwa]. i am also fascinated by ajami [medium]
posted by HearHere at 12:53 AM on October 11