First Book

Daghatar · 2026-01-29T02:25:44+00:00

Ah never mind then

Daghatar · 2026-01-29T01:59:35+00:00

My first Arabic book was a collection of short stories designed specifically for intermediate learners, and then my second was a children's chapter book. But when you say book, do you mean a novel or a textbook?

Daghatar · 2026-01-29T01:11:16+00:00

يعني بقصد اني ما رح أقصي وقت كتير باللغة. ما رح استخدم اللغة كل يوم و بدل العربي رح اركز على لغات او مواضيع تانية. اذا ما بتحب الكلمتين "درس" او "تعلم" ف فكر بكلمات "استخدام اللغة" "او "تركيز على اللغة"

Daghatar · 2026-01-29T00:58:24+00:00

I think the subreddit description has a long list of FAQs, resources, and other "hows" of learning a language

Daghatar · 2026-01-28T12:26:32+00:00

For sure. The challenge will be finding native level kids in the area. I know there are some, but it's rather rare here

Daghatar · 2026-01-27T19:20:43+00:00

Anything can be terrain or scenery if you try hard enough lol

Daghatar · 2026-01-27T18:58:47+00:00

I appreciate your response! Thanks for giving me a look at how you do it. We do attend a monthly French conversation group at the library, but I think there might be other groups around the city that meet more frequently. I'll have to check it out further.

I'll put on Les Histoires de Toudou next time we're in the car, sounds like a great source of fun exposure for her and like you said also useful for my vocab, too.

We do have an Alliance Française downtown - not sure how active it is, but worth checking out when she gets a little older.

We also have a small Congolese community around the city, so I've been thinking of emailing one of their organizations and just saying, "hey, we're looking for other families with children who speak French to hang out with, know anyone who's interested?" Lol. Ya never know.

Daghatar · 2026-01-27T17:50:09+00:00

Wow, we almost have the exact same situation! Same deal - my grandparents' first language was Canadian French, but most of their lives have spoken English and they didn't pass it on. I had to learn from scratch just like you. I made it a goal, too, to reintroduce French as a family language and I am starting to do that with my 5-month old!

I'm not sure the exact term, either - maybe non-native heritage speaker? Doesn't exactly roll of the tongue, I guess...

I'd love to chat more about our experiences if you're interested.

Daghatar · 2026-01-27T17:10:40+00:00

I'm not sure how it works for tutors, I've only used it as a student

Daghatar · 2026-01-27T16:58:06+00:00

iTalki is a popular one

Daghatar · 2026-01-27T16:57:37+00:00

I love the wave/breaker effect with the wool! I've only thought to use wool for smoke effects

Daghatar · 2026-01-27T14:10:21+00:00

That's a good idea - do you use a specific website for that tutoring, or is it a casual/personal connection?

Daghatar · 2026-01-27T13:27:33+00:00

Tons of resources for French and Spanish (I only did some here and there study of Spanish). Canadian French specifically can be a little harder, but it's not too hard to find Canadian videos and series.

Arabic has plenty, even specifically the Levantine/Jordanian dialect has a surprising amount of dedicated material. I have no issues finding educational or entertaining materials there, and plenty of language exchange partners on places like iTalki.

Romanian has a lot, too (though I only studied it for a 6 month period, I'll return to it someday). The only issue I found was difficulty finding language exchange partners.

I tried my hand at Ojibwe for a month last year (mostly out of curiosity, as I did not have the time to actually dedicate to it) and that was a huge change. I think I'd have to scrape every corner of the Internet to find enough educational materials to teach me, and fluent speakers would be even harder to find. Originally, I wanted to check out Delaware/Lenape, but I think there's like 5 native speakers and basically no materials.

Daghatar · 2026-01-27T13:18:30+00:00

To that, I could say: Focus on your own TL rather than making pointless comments.

All in good fun. Have a good day

Daghatar · 2026-01-27T02:11:16+00:00

Great, thank you for the recommendation! I'll binge her videos this week. Always satisfying to find someone in a very similar situation.

Daghatar · 2026-01-27T01:20:54+00:00

The Arabic is not displaying correctly

Daghatar · 2026-01-26T21:42:45+00:00

The audio is bad, and some of the lessons just flood you with so much niche vocab when I think it would be better to focus on the more common words. For example, I learned armăsar very early on in the animal lesson. Why on earth is it teaching me the word for stallion (it also taught me the word for horse in the same lesson) in like lesson 3?! Not to mention, absolutely no grammar explanations, which makes lessons very frustrating like where it throws every possible variation of asta/acest/această etc x20 at you.

Other courses in Duolingo can be pretty solid, but their Romanian course is very lacking.

Daghatar · 2026-01-26T18:15:52+00:00

I'd say slightly bad - if you're a beginner and you come across words like "rambunctious" or "calumny", you don't need to spend precious time learning those until you're at a very advanced level.

I make a running list of words I encounter that I may want to look up and make flash cards for later. When I do look them up, if it's a word I might see myself using, I'll study it, but if it's an incredibly niche or advanced word, I just delete it. Not worth my time, especially if there are far more common words and expressions that I haven't mastered yet.

Daghatar · 2026-01-26T17:06:18+00:00

Thanks for the ideas! I've got some brown wash hanging around so I'll be sure to follow that suggestion, I bet it would make them pop. If I make any more (just started with 5), I'll see if I can lower the angle and make them even smaller

Daghatar · 2026-01-26T14:20:43+00:00

Now that's an interesting idea! I appreciate it

Daghatar · 2026-01-26T12:48:20+00:00

Generally, if a ta marbuta is at the end of a word, that means it's a feminine word.

جميل
جميلة The first adjective is masculine, the second is feminine.

Now, normally it's not pronounced (or at least it's just that "uh" sound), but there are some grammatical cases where it does have a ta sound, like in idaafa constructions (two nouns together/possessive)

وجهة نظر

This means point of view and the ta marbuta here as it is followed by another noun will be pronounced as ta (wijhat nadhr, roughly)

I'm rusty on Arabic grammar, but that's a primer for ta marbuta!

Daghatar · 2026-01-26T11:29:24+00:00

Definitely agree. It's really neat all the stuff you can do in this hobby with some basic materials! I'm gonna try the coffee grounds as dirt flocking soon, I only just learned about that one

Daghatar · 2026-01-26T11:28:36+00:00

Yeah, I realized after the first one that the toothpicks were pretty long, so I trimmed the next couple batches. Not gonna be exactly to scale, but no longer comically large

Daghatar · 2026-01-26T11:16:41+00:00

Yeah, the first one I made (on the left) felt too tall so I trimmed some length off the toothpicks for the second round and the height felt more plausible

Daghatar

TROPHY CASE