Re: Learning Arabic applications

[Laboratory for Micro Enterprise <lme at storrs dot demon dot co dot uk>]

Hi Nadim

On Wednesday 05 January 2005 22:16, you wrote:
> John, I had a recent quickie conversation (on IRC) with Mohammed
> Sameer regarding your recent trip to Cairo (hope you enjoyed it).
I enjoyed my visit to Cairo, and my discussion with Mohammed. I also met with 
Professor Fahmy and colleagues at Cairo University Faculty of Computers and 
Information, and hope to build on that.

> Mr. Sameer noted that you had interest in developing (or were
> looking into) a flashcard type of system to learn Arabic from
> (sorry if I misunderstood and/or read too much into his comments).
>
> Were there any conclusive results from your inquiries and do you
> have any plans to develop such an application (we certainly feel
> that a great deal of others looking to learn Arabic would most
> certainly see benefit in this so we are all for it) ?  One simple
> approach to take would be to look into creating a very simple
> GUI-based teacher geared towards 5-year old kids (starting with
> mere letters and numbers) and then build on that by adding all
> sorts of bells and whistles to better cater to the older crowd.
I'm interested in linguistics generally, and would like to develop some 
generic open source tools for language teaching/learning. I've recently 
started trying to learn Arabic, which has introduced me to Unicode and text 
layout issues. Using C++, Qt and XML, I'm currently writing a simple 
application to produce paper flash cards. That will lead on to an interactive 
multimedia tool. It's based on an Arabic/English dictionary in XML format, 
currently very limited. I want the dictionary to have full diacritics. It 
should then be possible to generate western script transliterations 
automatically, among other advantages. Hopefully I'll have something worth 
releasing soon.

I'm interested in the idea of acquiring foreign language skills in the same 
way as children learn their mother tongue. If children's language 
understanding at different ages was captured digitally, you could start at 
the age of 3 say, and progress upwards at a decreasing rate as the vocabulary 
expanded. I intend to do some research about this here.

> Were any other topics of interest discussed or any plans made ?
I was interested to find out more about Arabeyes. Limited resources seem to be 
spread rather thinly. What are your priorities, and where do you most need 
help?

Regards
John