A pocket card could tell you what to say. To hear how to say it, you turned to the tape.
That division of labour is built into the 1980 third edition of Practical Arabic, my father Hanna Habib Farha’s course. The cards gave the learner something to read and carry. The tapes let them hear the exchanges those words belonged to. A greeting could be studied on the page and then heard in a conversation, where the reply and the rhythm mattered as much as the words.
Nearly two decades later, the documented second edition of his Modern Spoken English appeared in Beirut. He wrote it for Arabic speakers beginning to learn English. The format was a book, with short conversations, vocabulary, stories and exercises. The premise was familiar. A language becomes useful when you can do something with it. You hear an exchange, work out what the words are doing, then try them yourself.
Both courses now live on the App Store. The distance between a set of cards and an app can make that sound like a story about formats. What I kept coming back to was the lesson itself. What could a phone make easier for the learner, and what did my father’s materials already do well enough to leave alone?
What belongs to the lesson
A recording carries information that a transcription has to leave out. You can print a phrase and give someone a way to pronounce it, but the recording gives the phrase a pace. It shows where the speaker pauses and how much room there is between the question and the answer. A learner can listen once for meaning and a second time for a sound they missed.
Keeping the original recordings also preserves something of the course’s character. You still hear an exchange performed for the lesson. The words have a setting, even when it is as ordinary as an introduction or asking for directions. The recording and the printed lesson explain each other.
That relationship gave the mobile editions a clear starting point. The material is my father’s, and that authorship belongs in view. My work through Twain was to give the learner a way through it on a phone. The decisions were about access, reading, listening and practice. The text and recordings set the terms for those decisions.
Moving between listening and practice
In Practical Arabic, the cards and tapes asked a learner to move between two objects. On a phone, those materials can sit together. The recording plays beside the dialogue, and the current phrase can be highlighted as it is spoken. A learner can follow along, replay a line or spend a little longer on the vocabulary before trying to recall it.
Listen, Explore and Recall give those actions distinct places in the app. If a word in the dialogue is unfamiliar, the learner can go to Explore. If it feels familiar enough to try unaided, Recall gives them a prompt. They can return to the recording whenever they need to hear the word in context again.
The useful change is in the distance between those actions. On the same device, it takes very little to move from hearing a word to checking it and trying it again. That makes room for repetition without asking a learner to start the lesson over every time.
Modern Spoken English called for a different reading experience. An Arabic-speaking beginner may want to read the instructions in Arabic, follow an English exchange, then turn their attention back to the recording. Both languages need to be comfortable on the same small screen. A learner should be able to keep their place when they shift their attention from one language to the other.
The book already had a progression through conversation, vocabulary, stories and exercises. That progression still gives the app its shape. Playback controls let the learner pause or repeat. Vocabulary and notes give them somewhere to turn if they are stuck. Then the exercises give them a reason to put the words together and say them aloud.
A new edition has to be usable
There is a difference between holding on to material and giving someone a practical way to use it. The cards and the book are records of what my father made. The mobile editions have to answer ordinary questions from a learner in the middle of a lesson. Where was I? How do I hear that again? Can I get back to the passage after looking up a word?
Shipping meant attending to those questions alongside the course material. It also meant making the first step simple. Both apps start with five free lessons, enough to give a learner a sense of the recordings, the exercises and the pace of the course before deciding whether to go on. Once a lesson is available to them, they can use it and its recording offline.
The first lessons are also where the two editions can make the clearest introduction to my father’s work. Someone coming to them today can hear the original recordings and spend time with the way he organised a lesson. They can come back to a difficult exchange, hear it again and discover they can follow more of it. That is a modest thing for a piece of software to make easier. It is also the reason to make the software.
The App Store puts a course beside thousands of other things a person could download. I think more about the moment after someone opens it, when they choose a lesson, put on the recording and hear the exchange for the first time. The words are still my father’s. Now there is another way to listen.
