Learning Arabic (and Thai, Spanish, Chinese) Through Mondly — Vavai’s Personal Notes

Since a week ago, I started learning Arabic through the Mondly app. Last year, I studied Spanish using the Babbel app but stopped due to my busy college and work schedule. After starting to organize some personal projects, I began learning languages again, and this time I took a slight turn by learning Arabic. There are several reasons why I decided to take up Arabic as a second language after English and not continue learning Spanish immediately

The first consideration is to align with my memorization process. Currently, I have a project to memorize the Qur’an in installments while understanding its meaning and interpretation. I can guess some of the meanings of the verses of the Qur’an because they are like poetry and have some recurring words. I also once attended a madrasa and received initial learning about word formation in Arabic (e.g., the words يتعلم and تعلُّم, which mean learning), where there are changes in form if the position is in the middle or at the end (predicate or object) and if the subject is أنا (I) or أنت (you) or هو (he) or نحن (we), so I can learn a little bit about it.

By learning Arabic regularly, routinely, and on a scheduled basis, I hope to better understand the meaning and interpretation and facilitate my memorization process.

The second consideration is that I consider English to be an obligation. So, Indonesian and English are mandatory things that should be mastered, and I want to learn other languages to be useful for both communication and learning.

The third consideration is that Arabic is one of the official languages of the United Nations, spoken by hundreds of millions of people in the Middle East and Africa. If I can reach a certain level in Arabic, I can move on to other languages such as Chinese, Spanish, French, Russian, and even others like Thai, Japanese, Vietnamese. I also want to learn regional languages such as Javanese, Sundanese, and others to understand their respective cultures and learn from the original literature in those languages.

The problem is, I only started enjoying the pleasure of learning languages after I reached my 40s, haha… I don’t know why in my teens or in my 20s and 30s, I didn’t think about learning languages. Maybe it’s just my fate to be like this, just like why I only thought about continuing my master’s degree and memorizing the Qur’an in installments at this age.

I use the Mondly app to learn Arabic. I have used Babbel, Rosetta Stone, Duolingo, LetMeSpeak, and some other apps, but eventually, I chose Mondly for Arabic after comparing the processes.

I use English as the setting in Mondly. So, the learning explanations are in English to learn Arabic. In this way, I can also get used to thinking in English to learn other languages.

To maintain a regular schedule, I create a learning schedule in Asana project management, with a minimum study time of 10 minutes daily and a minimum score of 100.

Isn’t that too little? Well, I have to balance it with my daily work too. The concept is similar to the atomic habits principle, a 1% improvement done consistently will eventually lead to significant impact in the long run.

Later, I will try to share my progress after a few months, whether it’s good or not. So far, I’m enjoying the process and hope to be able to read news or stories and understand YouTube videos in Arabic a few months after learning. I’m not ruling out the possibility of taking an intensive Arabic course after completing the lessons in my app.

Originally published at https://vavai.net on March 16, 2023.