Arabic Inverted

Vocab Mnemonics Series Introduction & Approach

I. The Importance Of Vocabulary Acquisition For Beginning Students Arguably the single most important factor affecting a beginning Arabic students success is the extent of their vocabulary. A student with a vocabulary of 1000 words (typical of someone whos completed all of book one of al-Kitaab) can communicate far more effectively and read with far greater understanding than a student with a vocabulary of a mere 100 words. One reason is that the majority of the words in all texts are the same. Studies have shown that the 1000 most frequently used words in English, for example, comprise on average 70 percent of the vocabulary in a given English text. A second reason is that once your vocabulary reaches a critical mass, you will also be able to employ additional tools for inferring the meanings of unfamiliar words, dramatically increasing your effective vocabulary. These tools include contextual clues, knowledge of Arabic roots and morphological patterns. Until that point however, no amount of reading or listening strategies will help you very much. After all, how can one search for words with similar roots if one doesnt know other words in the first place? How can one utilize contextual clues, if one doesnt understand what these clues themselves mean? II. Challenges That Students Face In Memorizing Unfortunately, many students initially struggle with vocabulary acquisition. There are several reasons for this: First, many modern teachers deemphasize memorizing, in part because so much information is now readily accessible. Why force students to memorize the periodic table or how to spell Massachusetts when they are just a few clicks away? Second, for many students Arabic words are completely foreign. A young student can see the word heliocentric and already have some inkling of what the word might be about -heliocentric probably has something to do with the word center. But a beginning Arabic student seeing the phrase for the first time likely has no intuition whatsoever for what this word might mean. It reminds him of no words in his native language. Third, many of us are not used to the daily routine that memorization demands. With other subjects one can often get by studying intermittently, perhaps once or twice per week and intensively in the run-up to exams. Not so with Arabic. Arabic demands daily attention if one is to be successful. Your memory is a muscle that wont get strong through cramming sessions just as your bodys muscles wont get strong through a single intense week at the gym.
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Fourth, memorizing requires a high degree of patience. Unlike history or science, memorizing lacks the inherent excitement associated with reading a story or solving a problem. Fifth and finally, vocabulary acquisition requires not just learning new words but transferring them from short-term to long-term memory. This process can take a long time. III. How Qasids Vocab Help Can Help You While the challenges in acquiring vocabulary are numerous, there are time-tested solutions for overcoming them. One very effective solution, which has been used successfully by testtakers for millennia, is creating mnemonics. This normally requires a lot of work, however, Qasids faculty have spent countless hours developing a unique system for maximizing your recall and saving you time. The following are some of the most common techniques employed in our Vocabulary Help section: Directed Sensory Perception (DSP). This technique, which emerged from memory studies, strengthens a words neural network by associating it with strong secondary cues such as visual or emotional stimuli. The power of etymology. We connect the meaning of new words to that of familiar previous words via shared trilateral roots. Rhyme. Rhyme is a time-tested way to memorize. Arab linguists for example wrote a plenitude of poems to help students memorize subjects such as phonetics and grammar, some reaching 1000 lines in length.

IV. How Our Mnemonics Work: For most of our mnemonics, the Arabic words in each chapter are connected to a trigger word usually appearing early in the mnemonic in red capitalized letters. After this, the meaning of the Arabic word also appears in red and capitals. Consider the example below: Vocab word Translation Mnemonic

Grandfather Imagine the face of the JEDI Obi-Wan Kenobi. See him with all his loving grand children gathered around him. He looks like a GRANDFATHER doesnt he?

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Theres a lot going on here, so we want to unpack this a bit: First, we want an English homonym for the Arabic jadd. In this case, Jedi was chosen, both because it sounds like jadd and because there is a built-in association with old as most jedis are old. Second, when you read the word in Arabic, it prompts you to recall its homonym, i.e., jedi. Third, to re-inforce this, the sentence is fleshed out further with added details, and a reference to Obi-Wan Kenobi. The visual image of Obi-Wans grandchildren gathered around him further solidifies the association between and grandfather. Fourth and finally, memory studies have shown that recall goes up dramatically when a memorizer is active in the process. DSP directs a student to perceive (by imagining something visually / kinesthetically / aurally, i.e. through sensory stimuli). Having a student take 5-10 seconds to actually close their eyes and imagine this (as opposed to merely reading it passively) helps them to further lock the connection into the brain. V. Suggestions for Memorizing: 1. At Qasid, weve generally found flash cards to be the most effective method because theyre portable, you can shuffle them to review them in different orders, you can memorize from Arabic to English or English to Arabic, and you can easily add or subtract cards to a stack so that you can focus on just those words that are giving you trouble. 2. It is essential that you set up a daily habit of memorizing. Choose a manageable amount of new words, perhaps 5 to 10 words per day, and a manageable amount to review, perhaps 15 to 20 words a day. Then try to force yourself to do it consistently until it becomes a habit, often at least a month. If you can identify a time every day in which to do it -- while waiting for the bus, while walking to class, while eating breakfast, etc. it will make it easier to be consistent. Things that are not specifically scheduled are the first things to fall away in ones day when one is under pressure. Then if you find yourself about to go to sleep without having done your daily memorization work, force yourself to do it before sleeping. 3. Research suggests the more stimulus you have, the more permanently each word will be etched in your memory. So dont just simply read them over. Instead, close your eyes and imagine the word, especially if the mnemonic guides you through a particular image as in the DSP example above.. Moreover, when you read, read out loud and in a loud voice. This will help you to associate the words meanings not just with how it appears on a page, but how it sounds to your ear.

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