Show HN: I'm building a tool to practice numbers in Arabic | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I'm building a tool to practice numbers in Arabic

arabic-numbers.koljapluemer.com

50 pointsblackbrokkoli40 comments

Recently moved to Egypt, and in dire need to get the numbers down. Great excuse to explore learning software some more.

Possibly very niche, but maybe it is useful for someone else out there. Feedback is always welcome.

Looks great.

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.

Yes, you are right, and that should probably be clarified.

Good work so far!

Here’s my feedback after trying it out:

  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”

+1, I was confused by these misspellings as well. Otherwise awesome work.

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.

Good idea, thanks!

Maybe not useful for you, but I'd rather see the number names written out in Arabic rather than transliterated. IE صفر rather than sifr.

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!

Thanks! That's a good idea, I'm putting it on the list.

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!

Not everybody uses these terms, but the closest you’ll find is Romanized Arabic, or Arabizi.

And congrats on your progress!

Thank you for sharing your experience!

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..

I'm personally not a fan of the highlight after a few seconds. I would prefer an option to change the timing or remove it completely.

Noted, thanks!

Pretty cool! Took me a bit of time though to understand what I was supposed to do.

Also a tad annoyed by the fact that it's not in MSA haha

That's good feedback, thank you!

Sorry about the dialect, personal circumstance haha

Actually, I may introduce a toggle for MSA/different dialects. Can't promise, but check back in a day ;)

Pretty intuitive. I love the idea behind nudging towards the answer while making the user actually select it themselves.

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.

The questions seem to repeat a lot but otherwise very well done!

Btw, those are the Arabic numerals “0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9” while English one used to use Latin.

Edit: Well, It seems I’m late and already been said in the comments!

Could you please share more details about what sort of algorithm you use for the questions?

Is it spaced repetition? Is it a specific kind of spaced repetition?

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 :)

Hey, in case you are still interested, here is a little explanation on the algorithm: https://koljapluemer.com/2023/09/23/arabic-numbers-sr.html

Only past the half of exercises done I remembered that arabic is read right to left -_-

I feel like an idiot trying to see apostrophe of arba'a on the right...

too much clicking, but also, not many lessons there really.

i'm really greatful that after learning numbers existed in any other language i spent the time as a toddler learning tons of them.

these transliterations suck as well... at least in my arabic it is e/th/neen and /th/ele/th/a

Background breaks in firefox and tor browsers

Those are Eastern numerals https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Arabic_numerals

not to confuse with Arabic numerals which are the numerals most of world uses : 0123456789

indian numerals you mean?

smart ass... ;)

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..

Except you’re using Indian numbers (that are used in Middle Eastern countries ) (Arabic numbers : 0123456789 Indian numbers : ٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩)

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