I just have a question. Why do you call it "itneen" instead of "Etneen" or more formally "Ethnayn"?
I understand that you're probably leaning toward using Egyptian Arabic (I am Egyptian by the way) because it is the easiest dialect, but to be honest I myself got confused for two seconds.
Edit: I went through more questions, and you're definitely using Egyptian Arabic, not formal Arabic.
Pressing “Next” is just an additional, non-necessary step. Picking an answer should be enough to move to the next question, introducing a short delay might enhance the UX.
You are having some numbers misspelled, include, but might not be limited to, “اتنين/etneen” which should read “إثنان/ethnan” instead, “تلاتة”—>“ثلاثة”, and “ثمانية”<— “تمنية”
You might want to consider adding keyboard shortcuts for the keys 1-4 corresponding to the answer order so that the questions can be answered more quickly on desktop. I also agree with the others as far as spelling variations, maybe you want to include Modern Standard Arabic and potentially other dialect versions as well.
Thank you for the feedback! Exercises including the actual script as answer or prompt should show up after a while - it's a balancing act between people who prefer actual Arabic and people being overwhelmed by it (:
It's pretty cool. Maybe it will be a little better if there was an option to exclude pronunciation questions, for those who are only interested in learning the meanings. welcome to egypt!
Very nice!
Like many here, I got confused with the Egyptian sounding of the numbers. I think the default should be Classical Arabic, with dialects supports. It would be nice to also have the Arabic text next to the English, and to use Arabic numerals instead of the Indian ones.
I've met lots of Egyptians in my life, but I've never met anyone from any countries that might claim to use classical Arabic. So if this is for non-Arab world Learners, I imagine that learning the dialect most likely to be encountered is fine.
As a North African Arab (not Egyptian), I interact with other arabs each using their own dialect, because they wouldn't be able to understand my dialect easily. However, the claim being made about Modern Standard (not classical) Arabic or MSA for short, is that you can use it to communicate with any Arab around the world, anyone with highschool or even middle school level of education can communicate with you.
You may hear the claim that Egyptian Arabic is understood by everyone in the Arab world and that's true. But reminder that Egyptians understand most other dialects. You can imagine a person speaking Qatari with an Egyptian, it's possible that each uses their dialect and understand each other. But that wouldn't be the case for someone that only knows Egyptian.
I was actually thinking of my kids when I suggested that. Born in the west to Arab parents but can’t read/write Arabic. They definitely can’t understand Egyptian Arabic, but they listen to modern Classical Arabic so it’s easier to their ears.
Progress is more consistent if you keep your flashcards in the target language, according to the book “Fluent forever”.
The other day, fidgeting with the mobile phone, I set the lock screen’s watch to eastern numerals, it worked wonders. Not for pronunciation, nor naming them. For that, your app is great
Is there a term/phrase similar to Japanese Kanji/Romanji referring to the use of Latin script for the Arabic word? When it gets to a card pairing the latin script with the Arabic, I was totally guessing until getting enough to start making the association in my head. I'm guessing starting from blank sheet of paper to using this as learning Arabic numbers isn't the intended use case, however, I now know 0, 1, 2, and 5 in written Arabic!
I'm sort of using it as a from-scratch-learning tool myself (and I made sort of the same experience as you, after a while the first numbers start to stick) - although I definitely agree that it is very much a "getting thrown into the pool" approach to teaching.
In my head, I call the usage of Latin script for Arabic words "transliteration", which I believe is the general term for expressing a word in another script system. Not sure if there is a specific one for Arabic/Latin..
Tangentially, I recently wrote code to support Arabic ordinal suffixes and was frustrated to learn that, despite a unicode standard specifically for Arabic, it is more acceptable to use the English language rules.
It's a pretty lazy version of intra-session Spaced Repetition, vaguely based on Pimsleur's original definition, with some extras to avoid boredom/frustration.
Give me a day or so for a writeup then I come back to you :)
A bit of a tangent, but could someone tell me if I'm wrong about the following: Arabic being read right to left while digit significance increases right to left means they use little-endian (although it looks like they say numbers in a middle-endian fashion like in German). This means users of left to right scripts made a mistake by not reversing the digits when copying the system.
What I can't find quickly is whether the Indian system where this originated wrote numbers in a big-endian or little-endian fashion. As far as I can tell, Indian languages are mostly written left to right, so should the first people to use the system with a right to left script have reversed the direction of digits?
Eastern Arabic digits are read left-to-right, surprisingly. So e.g. in license plates, phone numbers, etc. (where you read the digits separately), you go left-to-right.
When speaking the numbers, you are right, the rules are the same as in German, e.g. Fifty-one is Whahed-wa-Khamseen, so similar to German Ein-und-fünfzig.
P.S: I'm German and live in Saudi, but my knowledge of Arabic is limited, so take it with a pinch of salt.
As another German living in SWAMA, I'd say this sounds correct.
Additional fun fact, the locals here don't actually seem to be aware that they read numbers the other way 'round. I pointed this out to two Egyptians now, both of whom told me that they never noticed. What can I say, I guess it's all habit and intuition...
My initial reaction before seeing the site was "but the numbers we use are arabic", of course, I realized you were trying to link number to spoken language.
Are arabic numbers harder to speak than any other language? Numbers seem to be the first thing to learn, and are rather simple, or is there a reason in Arabic that they are difficult, or more needed than in other languages?
Yeah, expressing that you are talking about the, eh, Arabic numbers in Arabic in a generally understandable way is pretty hard haha
I don't think Arabic numbers are necessarily the hardest of all, but coming from English, they are certainly tougher than, say, Spanish: The numerals are different, and so is the script in the long-form. It's "one-twenty" instead of "twenty-one" so to speak. And counting to 10 already requires quite a few of the really hard, uniquely Arabic sounds, like the 'ain. So yeah, not trivial :D
You can certainly learn them without this project, but you definitely have to seriously practice in some way..
I just have a question. Why do you call it "itneen" instead of "Etneen" or more formally "Ethnayn"?
I understand that you're probably leaning toward using Egyptian Arabic (I am Egyptian by the way) because it is the easiest dialect, but to be honest I myself got confused for two seconds.
Edit: I went through more questions, and you're definitely using Egyptian Arabic, not formal Arabic.