The Levantini Podcast
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The Levantini Podcast
Living Arabic
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Welcome to the Forincy Podcast. Forensic.us is a language training website for Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian designed specifically for intermediate to advanced learners. Our daily lessons prepare you to read real foreign language news articles and listen to actual foreign language media on a wide variety of subjects to put you on the path to language mastery. If you're studying Hebrew, Arabic, or Russian, you can visit our site at foreignc.us. That's F O R E I G-N-C-Y.us, and enter the promo code LANguageMastery for a 10% discount on our annual and six-month subscriptions. In this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Hosam Abduldar, who's the founder and creator of the Living Arabic Project and the Lurhatana application. The Living Arabic Project is a website that you can access at livingArabic.com, and it's an online Arabic dictionary that allows you to search for terms in modern standard Arabic, but also dialects, including the Egyptian dialect and the Levantine dialect. It's one of the only tools out there that I'm aware of where you can do this, and I think it's really fascinating and a really valuable tool. We spoke about the origins of Lukatana and the Living Arabic Project, but also the difficulties of learning the various Arabic dialects, how you can immerse yourself in the language without traveling abroad. And we also touched on the importance of finding a teacher who can be a true mentor and inspiration and how that can carry you through difficult periods of studying Arabic. I had a great time talking with him, and I hope you enjoy the show. So hi, and welcome to the forensic podcast. I'm here today with Hossam Abu Lahar, who's the founder and creator of the Living Arabic Project and the Lugatana application, which is available on iTunes and the Google store. Thank you very much for joining. Thank you for having me. So I found your website and your app through just general searches I do online regularly for Arabic resources and online dictionaries. And I think I came upon your site because I was searching for Arabic dialect resources. And there's a severe lack of real dialect resources out there. When I came upon your resource, I thought it was really tremendous because it's something that I hadn't seen before. So I was wondering if you could just tell me a little more about your project and how it got off the ground.
SPEAKER_00Sure. I grew up here in the US and have a mixed background, half, you know, half Lebanese. And even though I had to study Arabic most of my childhood, I really never really liked it. It was rather miserable, quite honestly, having to take Arabic in Quran classes. You know, being told things like, you know, the Arabic that you learn at home or from speaking with your father isn't real Arabic and things like that, and not really understanding why. So as soon as I got out of the private school I was in, I never wanted to speak Arabic again. And then after my undergrad, I did Peace Corps and I found I really enjoyed learning the local language. I was in South Africa. I learned a Bantu language called Shangan. I came back to the US at the end of 2007 and I said, you know, I'd really should learn Arabic, but I was going to do it on my own terms, is the way I thought of it. So I went to the local bookstore and I local university bookstore, and I bought all the Arabic books that they had, and I started studying five hours a day on my own. And for those who are familiar with the Al-Khatab series, I did all of book one and book two on my own in nine months.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00After that, I was able to test into the grad level classes and started my so I was able to count all my credits. Started my graduate degree in 2008, in the fall of 2008. I did well majored with Middle East Studies and stuff and public policy. All throughout, well, so I'm going to go take a step back. All throughout this time, I kept a word list, in large part because I didn't have anybody to help me out. And so I was starting to map out a lot of what I had struggled with as a child, which was how my Lebanese Arabic related to what I was actually learning out of the books.
SPEAKER_03And was this before like Quizlet and the flashcard apps that were online? This back in the day when you actually had to have notebooks full of Arabic vocabulary. Yeah, I remember those. I still have them. So yeah. As a souvenir though, I don't really I don't use them.
SPEAKER_00Well it's funny. I started it out as a literally on pen and paper, and then I'm like, well, it's getting long, and then we put it on the computer. And it started out really crude. It was just like every time I had a word, I just popped it in there with the definition. Right. Uh and it really has grown in sophistication. After grad school, I did kasa. I was supposed to go to Syria, but I ended up going to Egypt, which I don't at all regret. I mean, I learned in another dialect while I was there, and I met some great teachers who still support me. When I was done with all of that, you know, so basically four years since I had started studying Arabic on my own at the end of 2007, I found I had about 15,000 words or more than 15,000 words in a spreadsheet, split up between Fusha and Egyptian dialect predominantly. And I said, Oh, I should put this online because it had really given me an edge when I had been in classes and stuff like that. Like my writing quality was always really good in Arabic because if I needed to figure out a phrase, I knew exactly how to look it up. And I could write, even though Egyptian was not anyway my native dialect or quote unquote half-native dialect, if you will, I could still even write in Egyptian. I could translate things into the Egyptian dialect because I had basically a spreadsheet, the beginnings of the database that I that I would use to do a lot of this. So I got back, I got a day job, but on the side I kept doing this stuff, and I managed to get a very rough website up using PHP and MySQL for the database, and that was the first version of it. Back in, I think I launched it in 2013 or 2014 online.
SPEAKER_03If we can go back a little bit to your time in South Africa and the Peace Corps.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03What experience did you have there that rekindled your interest in learning a language? It was fun.
SPEAKER_00Growing up, Arabic was always this really slow, painful process of like memorize this, and I don't know why it means that, and I don't understand the grammar, and I don't understand why I say this at home, you know, but then I say this at school, and then we'd go overseas and visit the family in Lebanon, and people would laugh at me. My cousins would laugh at me, mix in Fosha, whatever. And none of it made any sense as a kid, you know. And I can see now I look back at it and I see that kids all the time, you know, they watch cartoons and fulsa and they mix it up. And it's a natural thing, and parents do laugh at them, but if you grew up in the Middle East, you learn how to balance between them pretty quickly. Right. But that's not a skill set that was taught to me as a child. And to be frank, it's a pretty difficult skill set to teach that level of what linguists would call code switching. Something we all learn. We learn how to speak more formally in an academic or formal situation. And then we learn how to speak in a more casual way. We learn even maybe to imitate different dialects, maybe if you're from the city versus and then you go back to the country or something like that.
SPEAKER_03What was your experience like in college when you started studying Arabic formally? Was it more enjoyable for you learning languages time, or did you still experience frustrations, and especially when it comes to learning a dialect?
SPEAKER_00So I think I got lucky in that regard. I had a really great professor. His name was Dr. Rahid Sami. Sadly enough, he passed away before all of this came to light, but he actually ended up taking the majority of my Arabic classes with him just because he kind of understood what I was going through, and part because he himself studied a lot of what he called hybrid Arabic, as he called it, looking at the mix between Fosha and Damiya, particularly used in the media. And he had also worked with Dr. Sayyid Badwe. For those who are familiar with Sayyid Badwe, he wrote the well-known Egyptian colloquial dictionary, him and Martin Hind, who, you know, Dr. Sayyid Badwe did a lot of studies on dialects. And so, anyhow, this professor I worked with, Dr. Wahid Sami, really worked with me a lot. I even did an independent study with him on how do you map out a dialect? Like, how do you teach yourself a dialect? Like if somebody throws you into Sudan or something like that and the dialect was not well studied, how do you teach it to yourself? How do you figure it out? And we did that by watching media and learning how to map out what was Voshan, what wasn't, how to break things down linguistically, so applying more of a linguistic approach to Arabic, but how to make it simple enough that you don't have to just spend your time looking at linguistic text. Because at the end of the day, there was a very personal aspect of this to me, which was I just wanted to be able to know Arabic and speak Arabic with my family and watch TV and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_03I was reading on the Living Arabic Project website. I think it was on your About Us page, but you were explaining how your story. And he had a metaphor that he explained to you putting MSA, Modern Standard Arabic, and the dialects in context. I'd love if you could touch on that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so he has said that you know you think of Foshar or Modern Standard Arabic as the sun, and then the dialects as the planets revolving around it, and that they're all sort of interacting with each other. There's sort of this gravitational pull of Fushan, which in this case is sort of its standardization, its long history, it's the fact that it's taught through schools and things like that. But the dialects all exist too, and they actually exist, you know, there's this whole argument that you get into of like are dialects their own languages or not? Well, in theory, they could be. There's honestly nothing wrong with saying that. But that's not how they exist right now, if you will. They exist within relation to the other ones. I mean, people watch Egyptian TV when you're in Lebanon or Syria, or, you know, and as television and videos and things like that have spread, you know, now people watch Turkish shows that have been dubbed over into Syrian and watch Moroccan cooking shows if you want, you know how to, you know, cook Moroccan and things like that. There's cartoons and Gulf Arabic and stuff like that. So it's all there and it's all interacting. And we laugh about it. There's a lot of like silly jokes. You know, one of them I just heard the other day is like, you know, the word for sheep in the Iraqi dialect. And I was like, Well yeah, Tali. He's like, well, you know the plural is Talian. So an Egyptian interpreter goes with some Americans over to Iraq and he asks this guy what you're doing, and he says, Well, you know, Kuntam Bad Baht Taliyan, I was slaughtering sheep. And the Egyptian looks up and tells the Americans he's slaughtering Italians. But they how they interact, you know, and we figure these things out and and we, you know, we laugh about it. But it's it's it's how it's how they exist. It makes it a more complex language environment, which is sort of the core complexity of Arabic, which makes it so difficult to learn.
SPEAKER_03How important is it, in your opinion, to have a teacher like that? I mean, I've had more bad Arabic teachers than I've had good ones, but I had one or two amazing ones that they're all I need for the rest of my life in terms of the inspiration they provided to learning the language and you know, and and being able to motivate me and rekindle your love for the language. I'd be interested to hear, you know, from your experience, how how important do you think that is to have a teacher like that or a mentor like that?
SPEAKER_00I think it's really the most important thing sometimes. I kind of look back at it, I wonder if I'd had a bad teacher that first time when I started grad school again, would I have just given up on it and studied something else, something that would have been easier, something that would have been more fulfilling? Because I at the end of the day, you know, what makes somebody go far in the language or with any study for that matter is that they find something to love in it.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00You know, and that's kind of one of the challenges with Arabic, I think, is that a lot of people study it because it's becomes a fad, because there's been a lot of classes in it, because they hear that they can make money working as a linguist in Washington, D.C. or something like that, or overseas as an interpreter or whatever. But you never really find a passion for it if you do it that way.
SPEAKER_03Right. It's also interesting, depending on how you come at the language, what your goals are, kind of what you were touching on is you want to work professionally as a linguist and get a job in DC, you probably need to focus more on Fusa, the modern standard Arabic. But if you want to be able to interact with people, talk to people on the street, and in my opinion, have more fun, I think the path is in dialect.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I completely agree with you on that. I mean, a language is at the end of the day the way we communicate, right? It's the glue that kind of holds us together in a social fabric. And fusa is an important part of that, without a doubt. But you know, to really learn Arabic and to live in it and to find a passion for it, you have to get at least some dialect in your life.
SPEAKER_03Right. That's why I love your app and your website. So you have the ability to search for words in modern standard Arabic, in Egyptian dialect, Levantine dialect. And I believe those are the three that are available right now, but what else do you want to have in the future?
SPEAKER_00So I'm actually planning on adding more. It's it's grown in complexity. I think this summer I'm gonna start a North African dialect one. I've already bought some books on it. So my process is usually that I teach myself the dialect first, and in the process, just like I started all of this out as I make a word list. And that's usually because the textbooks they have some of the core words that students are gonna want to learn, and students may even go through the same textbooks that I bought offline. It usually doesn't take that long to go through a dialect at this point because I'm able to, as I look at it, think of it linguistically as well. You know, I kind of can map out the similar thing. Okay, you have a bih here, you have a ka here, you have okay changes to you have on the, you know, and they have these different things that map onto each other. Right. After that, I try to find resources that are not copyrighted, which a lot of them are actually in Arabic, so it takes me a while to translate them. But the Arabs themselves have had a fascination with dialects, but they've looked at it differently than non-native speakers when they come at it. Like if you pick up a dictionary, I mean your standard Arabic English dictionary for Egyptian or Palestinian or something like that, there's not many of them, but if you find one, it has a lot of examples. It might be written with a phonetic screen with a transliteration instead of the actual Arabic and things like that to help people along or for linguistic purposes. But if you look at the like Arabic texts, like Henis Friha in Lebanon did a lot of work on it. And he actually writes in the introduction of one of his books, he's like, I'm writing, I started this work for Arabic English, but I'm making it all Arabic Arabic because I think it's important for us to know about the roots of our language and our culture and stuff like that. Some of the best resources, like I have this amazing resource. God knows if I'm ever gonna get around to translating it, but for the Syrian dialect, it's about 2,500 words. It's all in Arabic, but the richness of it. Now it doesn't have examples, so it's not the greatest for like a beginning learner and stuff like that, but for someone who wants to go further, someone who's really interested in how this ties into culture and it's used. That's really the neat thing, is that like you wouldn't think so, but it's I mean, if you open up Oxford's dictionary or Webster's or whatever, they're massive, right? But the language is used.
SPEAKER_03Right. That's one thing I I love about your site too, is you don't shy away from having dirty language in in the dictionary. I think it's I call it R-rated language learning, where I think it's a very critical part of mastering a language, but for obvious reasons, universities aren't gonna touch it. You know, they're not gonna teach you how to say, you know, whatever it is you need to say, but yeah, you can type that in in your search bar and there will be things that come up. And it is an actual part of language. That's how people speak. You know, if you stab your toe, you're gonna say an expletive. It's just the way it is.
SPEAKER_00Well, the other thing is like sometimes dictionaries will kind of skirt around it, and I'm like, you know, then somebody's gonna get in trouble. They're gonna go and use a word that they didn't realize how bad it was, and it's gonna cause a lot of problems. I mean, that became one of the big things when I was in Egypt, actually, is that some of the words that we use pretty commonly in Lebanon aren't considered proper in Egypt. Um the most common one being the word for ass. I mean, we use it in kids' songs in Lebanon. It's pretty commonly I mean, yeah, you still wouldn't use it in polite company, but like nobody uses that. Like kids are like just you do kids are like they get in trouble if they use with their parents and stuff like that. What's the word? Yeah, it's basically a cuss word for them.
SPEAKER_03How would you say it in Arabic? Please. Oh, okay. T is okay. T's like it's like if you're saying um that's I think it's Arabic slang also, but it's also Hebrew slang. If you're saying like someone's in the middle of nowhere, you say Tizam Nabi. Like Yeah.
SPEAKER_00There is a pretty crude one that they use actually in places in Syria and Iraq where they not even sure if I should say it on here, but they say Kisa'rab or Kisa. Which is, I mean, there's there's no getting around how bad that one is. But like these, like I said, we use it with kids, you know, all the time and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_03So do you think there's a a place for formally teaching dialect in universities and not not as an elective, which is usually how it is. I mean, from my experiences in grad school and an undergrad, you could take Lebanese dialect or Egyptian dialect, but it was never a formal, intense program that went on, you know, the four years you're there. Do you think there's there's a place for that?
SPEAKER_00I do. Let me just skip back to your previous question because then I can build on top of this one in terms of what else I want to do. I intend to map out uh what I call the seven or eight major major dialect families. So the remaining ones are North African, Iraqi, Gulf, Yemeni, and maybe Sudani. I haven't figured out how exactly that one fits in. Some people say it's different enough from Egyptian that I can't include it in a Nile dialect. Anyhow, what I would imagine, and my son is going to kind of end up being the experiment for a lot of this for me, but if you're in a class, basically that you'd start everybody starts learning the same thing, but then within the first year you have to self-select into a dialect. And so everybody has the same basic fusha classes, but then you self-select into a dialect, and there's separate coursework for each one of those dialects that you select into. You know, and one of the interesting things right now is that when you go to a university, if you want to take a dialect, it's basically depends on whether or not they have a teacher, a native speaker of that dialect there. But when you think about it, it doesn't have to be that way. Like people who are not native French speakers teach French, you know. People who aren't native Fusa speakers teach fulsa, don't always say. So there's no reason why like you can't have a standard, you know, your basic Egyptian teacher or whatever teaching Fusha, but then students self-select under them into Iraqi, Levantine, and and other ones. And then they're given specific coursework for that, and the Egyptian professor or whoever is able to explain that coursework to them, like you know, linguistically and stuff like that, even if they're not able to speak perfect Iraqi. Right. You know, it's I it's pretty straightforward once you know one dialect of Arabic and once you have the linguistic tools at your hands.
SPEAKER_03Right. You wrote something, I think it was one of your blog posts, and the topic was Arabic immersion. So usually when you say that, people think going to the Middle East, living in country and immersing yourself that way, which definitely is a method, but I don't think it's the only way. I think you can immerse yourself in the language at home as well, using you have to get creative and use all the tools at your disposal, but but it's possible. And love to hear your thoughts on that.
SPEAKER_00I completely agree with that, actually. And since I have a son now, he's almost three years old. Since he's come along, I really haven't had much of a chance to travel. But I find actually that I've basically immersed myself in the language quite a bit here. Combination of this project, you know, work, uh, you know, do some translation and stuff like that on the side. And then also with my son talking to him, but I read almost predominantly in Arabic when I read stuff now. That can be news, that can be literature. I have quite a collection of books. I mean, yeah, you do have to get creative, you know, uh, but there's also TV shows. A lot there's there's movies you can explore. There's actually a pretty decent set of movies, as long as you're willing to go back in time that you can collect. There's also, you know, some up-and-coming collections of graphic novels that are coming out. Like Dorun Bus has published one. There's some stuff like Metro and stuff like that published in Egypt. Dorun Bus is Lebanese. There's also a lot more these days on the internet, if whether you want to do dialect or fosshab, but like storytellers and stuff like that, that you can find. Nadine Toma, Darunbus, she's a storyteller, Hakawatiya. Sally Shalabiyya, she's a Jordanian, I believe, Jordanian-Palestinian. She's all of her stuff is on SoundCloud, really good quality stuff. Right. I mean, SoundCloud and stuff like that, you mean you pull it up on your phone, you listen to it while you're cooking or whatever, you know. Maybe you don't hear all of it, but you make some notes to yourself if you hear a new word or something like that. And before you know it, you know, you're spending an hour, two hours a day in Arabic without even really trying.
SPEAKER_03Especially if you go abroad and you do an immersion program abroad, you're just spending five hours in a classroom usually. Yeah, you can do that here.
SPEAKER_00Right. Yeah, you do like why am I here, right? Yeah, I mean, and then you know, to really make if you do go abroad to make an immersion program work, you really have to like push yourself to get out in the street. And the program has to kind of like help you make connections with locals so that you have people who could talk to who will put up with you stuttering and taking your time with the language.
SPEAKER_03Right. It's pretty it's pretty amazing, especially when you're just thinking about where it's gonna go and how much technology is pushing it forward. I remember maybe like five or six years ago, if I wanted to do an Arabic lesson with a tutor, I'd have to find them on Craigslist. I'd have to drive out, you know, 30 minutes to wherever they were, meet them in a cafe, deal with the awkwardness of talking to somebody in Arabic that you don't know in a Starbucks. Yeah, you know, taking notes on a piece of paper, driving back 30 minutes. And I remember just thinking this isn't sustainable. I think there has to be a better way. And I think now there is, whether it's online tools like yours or mine, iTalkie, which is I think a tremendous website. I mean, in terms of finding dialect teachers abroad that you can afford, that everybody has different methods on there too. So you know, you combine all these tools and you have a pretty good recipe to master a language.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, I mean, I mean, I keep even saying for myself, like I came back from Peace Corps and I just bought all the university books too, you know, university store books and just started doing five hours a day like that, you know. And there's nothing, I mean, it was probably more intensive doing that than it would have been to go abroad at that time, honestly.
SPEAKER_03Right. And it's still hard. I mean, you can't take the difficulty out of it. And I think a lot of language learning websites are a little disingenuous when they claim, you know, we're make you fluent in three weeks. Like it doesn't work that way. It takes 10 years or more or lifetime. And on the lifetime point, it kind of gets back to your project, the Living Arabic project. And I love you can touch on what you mean by that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, I you know, when I found What made Arabic fun for me was that I found that it was a living language, basically, that it was spoken, that it was used, that it had jokes in it, music, all the stuff that you know makes life fun, that makes life alive. It wasn't just like these textbooks I had to go through as a kid and stuff, or even, you know, in school, you know, medium Arabic is like if that's all you study, that's pretty rough, I have to admit. Right.
SPEAKER_03The languages are changing. I mean, Arabic is changing all the time. All languages are. And the last podcast I did was with a guy named Dr. Jonas Siboni, he's a professor at Strasbourg University in France. And the topic was Judeo-Arabic dialects in North Africa. But a big portion of that conversation was about how languages are always changing. And if you live in one community, it's going to evolve, and but you know, depending on who you're surrounded by and things of that nature, and the same things happening in Arab communities inside of Israel right now, and you know, good or bad or politics aside, it's it's fascinating to look at. And there's people who have done a lot of research on this, but you'll see that Arabs living inside of Israel and surrounded by Hebrew-speaking communities, they're starting to incorporate Hebrew into their Arabic dialect, whether it's slang or large portions of their vocabulary is turning into Hebrew mixed with Arabic. And it's pretty interesting to see, but I think that's indicative of how languages work in general. I think there are some unfortunate circumstances surrounding that, but it's still something interesting to watch.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, I can even comment on that. Like my, you know, a couple of people have commented, and I can, and my personal aspect is like immigrant communities here, and especially in the past, now we'll see how modern communication technology changes that, but like my dad's generation, when they go back, you know, and they talk to people, they sound different. And my my uncles will say when they're talking to my dad, it's like, yeah, it's like we're talking to our to our father. You know, like my dad came and when he was in his 20s and his dialect basically froze at that point. One Egyptian said it to me, she's like, Yeah, I talked to my relatives who are in Canada. It's like you know, having a flashback every time I talked to him. Um, word design to use. I was surprised last time I went to Lebanon about a month ago and visited my family, and you know, I was amazed at how different people spoke, like just the amount of English that they that a lot of them that my generation was incorporating versus my uncles.
SPEAKER_03Right. It's kind of like a cool thing to do, to to mix English into your Arabic.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I mean, and there's so much of it. And it's interesting, not my son, though I speak to him exclusively in Arabic, and and I'm trying to like figure out how to like balance between dialect and and fosha. But I make sure to keep it in Arabic. So it's kind of like weird for him. I think he was got confused sometimes when people would throw in some English. He's like, Do I talk to them in English or in Arabic?
SPEAKER_03Right. To go back to the Living Arabic project and the and the Lugatana app, I want to talk about how you got that off the ground in your work with refugees. If you could tell me a little bit about that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so most of the work, I mean, I was just I did a lot of it on my own. I did all of it on my own, I should say. You know, and it was just, but you know, to learn a programming language and stuff like that, I had a very minor background. And like I did one year in computer science before studying majors. It was just, you know, I I'd learned I'd learn Python, but like then I'm like, oh my God, I have to learn Django. But my wife's a software engineer, and I just like she's like, oh, this is what the latest stuff is, this is what you should be using. And I'm like, I have no idea. And I'm trying to like learn all these different things. And I'm like, okay, I can do the data entry. And at this point, the data entry is straightforward, but there's a lot of rules to it. And so when I tried to outsource that a couple times, I just couldn't do it. So I'm like, okay, I need some help with the coding. And I've been working, my day jobs have predominantly related to Syria since about 2012. So I was like, well, you know, I know all these Syrians, they're really talented. They like, you know, masters, some of them are trying to do PhDs abroad now and stuff like that. It's just they don't have money. But, you know, I talked to them and they're like, yeah, we'll do it. We'd love to do this. We think it's great. We think it's helping educate our kids who are growing up outside of Syria and who are you know, we don't know how to teach them Arabic. You know, we don't know how to like teach them our dialect. There's no, you know, it's a common myth that there's no grammar to these dialects and stuff like that. And so they're like, Yeah, you know, we'll we'll do it for pretty cheap. You know, this is a pretty straightforward project for us. You know, you know, guys who are doing PhDs, they do the they make a website like this in their sleep. So last year I uh did a Kickstarter for it. My first Kickstarter failed, but it was a good learning experience. With a month or two after that, I ran the second round of it and managed to get enough money for it. And I paid these two Syrian refugees the 5k that I earned from it, basically, to redo the website and build the app. And it was kind of like a one-package thing because they had to, with they when they did the app, they had to redo the inner the way the app would interface with the database anyhow. So they were gonna do the website anyhow. Right. But they've been great, and we're actually, you know, the app is actually now gonna be able to pay for stage two. Stage two is a pretty boring stage, it's more like upgrades to the database structure and stuff like that. Because he looked at it and they said, You are, you know, they said to me there, but it's like you are forgiven from doing any more coding, you know, you're forgiven from doing any more coding, you know, because they just looked at us like, what did you do to this?
SPEAKER_03Right. How much time is it does this occupy?
SPEAKER_00I try to get in like an hour a day here and there when I can't, you know. Well, I try to do at least an hour a day. On the weekends, you know, my wife, yeah, you know, if there's not too much around the house, she's like, go take a morning off and I'll take care of the kid, you know, so I can get some extra time and done. Uh or nap time is another good time.
SPEAKER_03Right. And are you do you see this as a lifelong project?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I do. I mean, honestly, i I would like it to get to the point of being more self-sustaining. More self-sustaining meaning that it brings in enough money where I can continue to pay people, probably refugees this whole time, which means it won't be that it doesn't have to bring in that much, but that then they can kind of take over the day-to-day management and the coding and even the data entry. Although, like I said, you know, the data entry takes a linguistic mind mixed with an understanding of databases. So there's a complexity to it. But still, because then that'll allow me, I mean, after yeah, the dictionary part is is what I'm focused on right now and mapping out these all the different dialects. But after that, there's so much I'd like to do because the data is so rich. I mean, there's stuff that doesn't even show up. I have a whole column in there about word origins. And even though I don't know Hebrew, I've like learned I've learned how to write and type in Hebrew because a lot of the Arabic words that we use are related to Hebrew. So like things like that. I mean, you could just I have a lot of words that are mapped out related to Aramaic and other words. Um, there's tons of studies I can do. I'm working right now on on uh adding a bunch of serious specific words to the Levantine dialect, but when I'm done with that, hopefully this summer, before starting on the North African one, I want to take a little bit of time to write what I'm gonna call a context tool. And I'm not sure how I'm gonna release it yet, but the idea is basically if you have a word, you want to know what that word is used with. Right. Like haptapah to realize or or actualize something. And what words is that commonly used with? How does that compare with Nefada to execute something? Are there other similar words that you know a non-native speaker might get confused? You know, how do we know what it is, you know? So the context app or context tool basically would you click on a word and it would search through the entire database and pick up all of the related, all the words that are used with this.
SPEAKER_03Right. That would be really clutch if you're able to do that. Because that's one of the biggest mistakes people make is when you're speaking with somebody in a foreign language and you use a word that, yeah, this does mean to achieve something, but not in this context. You would never use this word in that context.
SPEAKER_00I think I'm pretty sure I can. I've been mapping it out in my head this whole time. In a few more months, you know, I'll email you if it works out.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, let me know. We'll get the word out. Well, great, look, it's been great talking to you. I think this is a really tremendous app and website, and it's developing all the time. If you could just please tell people how to find your website and and how to find your app.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. The website is at www.livingarabic.com. Or if you just search for the Living Arabic project on Google at this point, it's pretty much the first result. The app uh is on the iTunes Store and the Google Play Store. You can find it. I can find it under Lukatuna, L-U-G-A-T-U-N-A.
SPEAKER_03Well, great. Let me know if uh whenever you get this context tool up, definitely want to get a crack at that and have a look and keep up the good work. I think you're doing something that really makes a difference, and it's definitely something that people need.
SPEAKER_00Thanks a lot. It means a lot for me to hear that. It gives me the energy to keep going. Yeah.
unknownAll right.
SPEAKER_03Well, I'll talk soon.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, take care.
SPEAKER_03Bye.