Show HN: I'm building a tool to practice numbers in Arabic (arabic-numbers.koljapluemer.com)

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

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

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.

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!

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

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.

[flagged]

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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”

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

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?

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?

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

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...

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.

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.

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?

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