I’ve lived in Saudi for 17 years now. Grew up here, not born here. You’d think I would’ve learned Arabic in the first five years but I only actually cracked it in the last two. Tried everything before that. Every Arabic deck on AnkiWeb, Duolingo, Pimsleur, courses. None of it stuck.
I’m a doctor and it was embarrassing honestly. Consultants would talk and I’d catch maybe half of it. Patients would describe their symptoms and I’d nod along pretending I understood. You can’t take a proper history if you don’t understand what the patient is actually saying. I was getting
by on English and awkward smiles.
I kept thinking about AnKing and how the med school community built these incredible Step 1 and Step 2 decks. Thousands of cards, detailed explanations, supplementary resources for everything. Why didn’t anything like that exist for Arabic? So I got frustrated enough to just start building my own.
I started with Saudi dialect first because that’s what I needed day to day. Got a native speaker to record the audio because TTS sounds robotic and you can’t learn pronunciation from a robot. Then I made a Medical Arabic deck right after with actual patient phrases I hear at work. After
that came Levantine and Egyptian because I wanted to understand those dialects too.
Got Step 1 and Step 2 done then went to the US for rotations. Saw how many Spanish-speaking patients there were and I didn’t want to make the same mistake again. Even with translators available I wanted to understand basic Spanish and medical Spanish myself. Started building those decks too.
Showed everything to some medical student friends and they actually loved them. We ended up making Medical German decks together for people heading to Germany.
The samples are on AnkiWeb if anyone wants to try, just search Eidetic. Full versions on my site.
Would love to hear what resources actually worked for other people learning Arabic or medical language stuff.
SIGNATURE:
eidetic.cards