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by raincole 265 days ago
> Instead of learning to type

How do you know they are not learning to type?

> you complain about letters having different forms

Where did they "complain"?

The OP's article:

> From this, I will extract three screenshots (with the MacOS screenshot tool). First, to create a card of type “basic” (one side). I use this type of card to exercise my reading, which is very difficult and remains stubbornly slow, even though I know the 32 letters of the Persian alphabet quite well by now. But the different ways of writing them (which varies by their position in the word) and the fact that the vowels are not present makes it an enduringly challenging task.

It doesn't sound like they literally can't type in Persian, or they're complaining about how it's written, at all. They're merely stating the fact it's difficult for them (like every language learner).

They also screenshot the English part too. So presumably they screenshot because it's faster, not that they can't type.

> Author, you're not properly engaging with the language

Strangely condescending. They're focusing on reading and listening, which is legit for beginners.

I do agree that the use of Anki cards is suboptimal though.

1 comments

In English you have to actually press shift to change q to Q. In Persian, this is all done for you. Simply press a letter key and the correct form will appear (automatically changing form based on letters later.) Describing that as "challenging" indicates that the author does not know how to type in Persian.
...

He's talking about reading as a challenge. Not typing. It's very clear and unambiguous from the original article.

You still misunderstand. This is only relevant because the author doesn't understand the system and instead of engaging with it, is making counter-productive crutches which prevent actual learning.

I'm flagging your comment for claiming I didn't read the article. If the author has trouble reading letters, how can he type well (which was your first point)? Addressing that first would prevent him from using transcriptions and dual sets of flashcards.

Author here: my learning objectives, in order of importance, are: (1) vocal understanding, (2) speaking, (3) reading, and (4) typing and writing (far further). As I explain, I'm mostly bypassing the problem of typing by using screenshots (ChatGPT's OCR capabilities are very good, and Anki works very well with it too).
With a few hours of applied learning, distinctions between these will collapse. If you work on typing, your reading will naturally improve (because you're identifying letters to input). With stronger reading, you won't see differences between scripts and reading will be the same as listening. That is, improving your knowledge of the language by reading will improve your listening comprehension too. (Reading the wikipedia article on phonology will also unify reading out loud and speaking, Persian is extremely phonemic.)

At minimum, consider a few hours now compared to the time saved by halving the number of flashcards you need.