Take my word
Whenever discussing the pedagogy of something, I almost always make a statement which has to be taken for granted. I’ve studied long enough to know that these statements must be true, but I have no studies or statistics to prove so. So rather than burying them beneath 20 layers of subtext, I will lay them out here:
- The more “autodidactable” a material is, the easier it is to learn.
- Anything which can be verified by a computer can be “autodidactable.”
Now what do I mean by “autodidactable?” It’s a fancy term I coined which is derived from the word autodidact, i.e, someone who is self-taught. So if something is autodidactable, then the self-taught person should have no problem learning it through the traditional method of self-teaching.
Self-taught is a confusing word. After all, someone did write the book or website which the “self-taught” person learned from. But do not get distracted by the minutiae. Self-taught here merely means that they did not direct access to an instructor. Learning through unconscious objects is not quite the same as having a lively teacher who is ready to answer questions and give questions at a moment’s notice.
And what is this “traditional method” of self-teaching? It’s quite simple:
- Learn the concept (traditionally done by reading a book).
- Use the concept in some way (traditionally done by solving problems).
- Verify that you used the concept correctly (traditionally done with an answers key).
- If you used it incorrectly, revisit the concept either through the same book you initially learned it from or by scouring for other material. Then repeat the process.
- If you used it correctly, congratulations! Either practice more by repeating step 2 or move on to the next concept.
Note that these are just general steps to learning. The key difference is that all of them can be accomplished independently. It is often the case that instructors are required for steps two and three, which is why some skills are not autodidactable, such as speaking a new language or directly improving one’s writing. One needs constant feedback for those skills, none of which can be provided by a book or a computer. They need a second person present who already has the skills mastered and are willing to pass them on.
As I said, these steps are rather simple, so I won’t ramble on them. If you feel there’s a contradiction with step 1, then please read the next paragraph. Otherwise skip it.
Begging the question?
You may feel that I’m begging the question by saying one should be able to learn the concept for it to be autodidactable. I resolve this issue by distinguishing learning from studying (didacting?). If you’ve ever tried to study a math book without an answers key, or if you’ve watched a thorough science video on YouTube (such as the ones from Veritasium or VSauce), then you know exactly what I mean. You can learn all you want, but you’ll never develop certainty or mastery of your knowledge if you can’t use these concepts or verify the correctness of your usage. So for a concept to be learnable without an instructor present, it only needs a recordable medium to be expressed by. Consequently, as the remainder of the steps show, students require more than the mere expression of ideas to understand concepts. If they did not, schools would not have homework or tests!
Recall my premises: if it’s autodidactable, it’s easier to learn, and anything which a computer can verify must be autodidactable. I know these to be true from experience, but if I may take one second to rationalize them, you can imagine that if you have fewer dependencies (to use programmer speak), then there’s less chance of failure. So even if you prefer a lively teacher, being able to resort to self-study at any time will certainly increase your chances of success, because there are times when that’s needed.
The latter statement is mostly true. If a computer can verify correct usage, then a student could also verify correct usage by using the computer. That fulfills steps two and three. All that’s left is step one, and as you’ll see, step one is never the problem.
The State of Arabic
For this section, keep in mind that I’m referring to the average Westerner. Obviously, if you live in the Middle East or in Pakistan, then you’ll likely have different things to say about the State of Arabic.
So, you’re an American. You want to study Arabic (presumably to read classical Arabic texts like the Quran). What do you do? If you can find a tutor, that’ll be about $35–$50 dollars per hour. They say it takes 10,000 hours to become a master. You can do the math.
If you want something more formal, you can travel to Jordan (cost not included) and study at Qasid, which averages around $2600 per term (out of five in total). Don’t want to travel? Fortunately, they offer online courses for $1500 dollars (that’s for the first level, out of five)!
They say America is the land of colleges, so why not enroll in one near you and pay $20,000? Oh, never mind.
Well there are other online programs that are cheaper and are not complete… this isn’t helping either is it?
I want to be completely clear: these costs (besides the college tuition) are reasonable. Qasid costs about half as much as a United States college, and they have staff to pay and a building to maintain. When you pay a tutor $40 dollars, they’re not just reading from a PowerPoint presentation. They’re reviewing the material and committing to a schedule for your convenience. Yet is it wrong to want to learn Arabic for free? Actually, why can’t we have it for free? Why isn’t it autodidactable? (Note, the best current way to learn Arabic online for free is by following the Madina track; but the track is far from optimal)
Going back to the earlier steps, all the books for learning Arabic are available, and most of them are free online. That fulfills step one, and doubly so for being free. The second step is a given: find an Arabic book and put your comprehension into use. The third step is where instructors are needed: verifying your usage of each concept. Currently, that is practically impossible to do independently, and sometimes for good reason. For instance, as stated earlier, you cannot practice writing Arabic on your own. However, you certainly could practice grammar and morphology on your own, and subsequently, improve comprehension. Here are a few other examples you can practice:
- Arabic alphabet (already been done on YT; here’s interactive game done for Hebrew; probably more resources but I’ve not done much research here).
- Gender (هو وهي, مسلم ومسلمة).
- Plurality (مسلمون ومسلمات).
- Word endings (هذا زيدٌ ورأيت زيدً; here’s an interactive example; and Camelira shows promise).
- Morphology (not exactly suited for studying, but sarf.one and Camelira show promise).
- And so on…
Unfortunately, most books don’t tend to have exercises, and some have exercises but no answer keys. So while these are concepts which could be independently studied, they currently cannot be. However, I hope you’re beginning to see why I claim that Arabic reading comprehension can be self-taught, even if that is currently hard to do.
Of course, writing aids reading and vice versa, so there is eventually a limit to self-study, and one must eventually seek a master of the subject. However, I believe it’s fair to say that most learners are not thinking about mastery. At the very least, they want a good enough comprehension so that they can read and understand a commentary. No writing involved. If that can be done for free and at their own pace, then that is a successful project.
A Successful What?
We take for granted the impact that Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and YouTube have had on the STEM community. They absolutely changed the playing field. I’ve been through high school and college courses which were entirely taught through free YT videos. In those cases, students were not enraged by the fact that the videos were of low quality; rather they were enraged that they had to pay tuition for their degree, fully knowing they could study on their own using these free resources. That goes to show that Khan’s initiative was successful. More students were now studying STEM in their free time and actually enjoying it too. You could say some were even hooked (totally not me).
So I’m working on a project. God willing, I hope to replicate this same initiative to improve the Arabic learning experience. It will not be a simple webification of what currently exists in hard cover books. But before I delve into the details, let me address a few common questions:
Duolingo!
Okay, that’s not a question but I’ve gotten this a lot. Why make yet another Arabic learning app when there are already so many out there? Isn’t Duolingo good enough?
To be honest, until this suggestion was first brought up, I never even thought about Duolingo as I worked on this project. Duolingo’s goal is to teach you reading, writing, listening, and speaking. I do not want to cover speaking, writing, or listening since they don’t directly aid in reading classical texts. In addition, while Duolingo states all four, they certainly focus much more on speaking and listening (to my knowledge, specialized or advanced reading and writing is never taught). I would like to focus almost completely on reading, covering enough so that students would be ready to read highly technical books. In other words, the site will focus almost entirely on grammar and morphology, something which Duolingo basically completely skips over.
Books!
I stated earlier that the main problem is in what the books lack. So logically, any issue I have could be solved by writing another book, and you would be correct absolutely right. However, I like websites, and I’m quite bad at MS Word. So I’ll stick to programming. Nonetheless, I am flattered by your suggestion.
Solution?!?
Okay, here are the project details. First, it’s a project of many projects, with the overall goal of enabling students to self study Arabic. Second, there are currently three active projects (all of which are work-in-progress):
- NahwApp (which you can try here)
- ArabicTags
- ArabicCorpus
The goal of NahwApp is to be the main pathway for students to start from zero and go to hero(-ish). Currently, it only supports word ending questions, and in that regard, the only thing that’s left is the feedback system. That is meant to be supported by a database known as ArabicCorpus, which is supposed to be function similar to QuranicCorpus. That database will be filled by another project called ArabicTags, which lets grammarians insert and edit sentences, in addition to tagging specific words to indicate their type, their word ending, the cause of their word ending, and so on. We hope to release all three projects in to the public, inshallah, by the end of September. We look forward to your feedback!
Other projects I’d like to work on include more utilities such as ArabicTags, as well as a sort of Wikipedia for Arabic grammar and morphology. And then, maybe 30 years from now, I can work on a similar project for Greek, Hebrew, and Sanskrit. Who knows :)
If you’d like to contribute or if you have questions, please contact me at amrojjeh@outlook.com.
