Thanks for the feedback.
I might disagree with your characterization that the problem I'm addressing here as a non-problem as writing systems are there for a reason and so is mine.
Eskéndereyya doesn't tackle the problem of Arabic letters memorization as this is a very simple problem to crack. It instead addresses pronunciation and reading and to a lesser degree writing as you may know that the common way to write and serve text in Arabic is without diacritics, and for this reason, it becomes hard for beginners to practice and improve their skills without aid and this is where I envisioned Eskéndereyya to fill the gap.
I'm not sure what you're trying to convey with the part of accents in your comment. Are you referring to Arabic regional dialects/languages?
Re complexity, doing nothing will always be less costly that doing something in terms of energy and effort but this point of view overlooks the gains or return expected on the energy expended, and if the return turns out to greater than the costs, the endeavor is determined to be profitable and vice versa.
So, you may think that this layer of complexity is unnecessary but I will take your word "sa7" as an example to prove how I think otherwise.
"sa7" is "صح" in colloquial Arabic but it's still ambiguous and confusing as the letter "s" in Arabizi can mean both "س" or "ص" depending on context but when the word is transliterated as "šaħ", the ambiguity disappears with no room to error.
You might counter and say that there's no "سح" in Arabic but there actually is but it's less common since it's slang but featured in a well-known old Egyptian folk song titled "essaħ eddaħ embú السح الدح امبو"
To summarize, there's always a trade-off and it's up to you to decide which you to go.
I'd say you are on the wrong side. All Arabs continue to write in Arabizi. I have lived in this region for years, as a non-native speaker. When I first arrived as a student for my first rodeo in 2006, I once wrote SMS in Arabic letters. That Egyptian kid later asked why I would do that. He was terrified it was a plant or a trap or something, that is how rare it was then.
However, I will give you a point. None that we are moving beyond basic SMS encodings and the limit of standard cell phones and on to Unicode and emoji-rich smart phones, WhatsApp and others have enabled a renaissance in Arabic writing amongst some.
But many continue to write to me in English characters. And re your point learning in one day: the reading is fun, the writing on a keyboard for a society where Arabic literacy (not English, mind you) is largely de-emphasized and many cannot read/write formal Arabic, the desire for Arabizi hides deficienies people would not rather admit.
This is the exact problem with learning Japanese using roumaji (rouma ji = roman character; ローマ字), because you of course start to read the latin script with your starting accent (assuming of course your first language is written using the latin alphabet).
However some textbooks persist with using it, despite being excellent otherwise (Japanese: The Spoken Language being one). I can't stress enough the need to move off reading Latin characters. It is also useful to learn the characters by sound rather than their roman equivalents. i.e instead of learning that ロ is "ro", you could learn it by listening: https://youtu.be/aLEtZ2CRoho?t=1m53s
The mental association is everything.
The mental process goes like this; I identify the language of text let's say Spanish and then like a switch in my brain is turned on for the Spanish pronunciation and then I proceed to read the text using the rules of the Spanish language while English is totally disabled.
This is not like unique to me as I observed other students with the same process. I can't really say that the issue you described is a universal issue for all language learners worldwide.
However this mode switching is not reinforced in the case where the script (in this case the Japanese script) is not latin-based.
I think I'm trying to say that native speakers of latin-based languages who are learning latin-based languages have to learn to change their mode of pronunciation, whereas if they were to learn a non-latin-based language they don't (and shouldn't) learn this at all, because in the long run it isn't useful.
Japanese characters have one pronunciation in all circumstances (excluding diacritical modifications). Respectively in romaji, consonants and vowels will always have the same pronunciation. Compare that to American English where accents have been removed and even native speakers can have trouble pronouncing new words.
I know, but students will continue to treat it as a pronunciation guide anyway, unless told specifically how to pronounce otherwise. It's especially bad when the Japanese is supported by romaji way into the course, which fosters laziness in the student.
But I can still sound out words in the Cyrillic alphabet without any difficulty. Learning another alphabetic script really doesn't take that much time or effort.
I switched to French.
Exactly, for most other languages as well. I only needed flashcards with Hebrew (as an Arabic speaker, I only needed to remember shapes because sounds are similar). To learn Cyrillic was more figuring out what changes and connecting it to Greek alphabet (р is rho, г is gamma, д is delta, п is pi, etc).
Transliteration for most languages is just another layer of complexity in my opinion given the tiny amount of time I needed to acquire alphabet (the letters, not Google's parent company).
Here's something I started. Need to get back to that:
And I think learning all sorts of nuances of the language would be more complicated using Latin script. Latin script also hides the fact that, even though the letters are similar, they really are different sounds. I feel like it would only hinder pronunciation.
However Arabic script is a whole different thing. It has a whole lot of diacritics, characters change their shape depending on the position within a word, characters are notably less distinctive for an unaccustomed European than Latin letters, Cyrillic letters, hiragana or runes.
Using diacritics is usually a sign, that the language uses a script that does not map very well to the target language, so the latter would be understandable.
Slavic languages would the same in this regards. Those, that are written in Latin script, have to use diacritics. Those that use Cyrillic, do not need to.
But then, I'm also not an expert on all Slavic languages, I just remember when I was taught Russian and azbuka years ago, there was none and that caught my attention.
LOL Please, tell us an «all Cyrillic» alphabet. Old Church Slavonic by Saints Cyril and Methodius maybe?
Why Belorussian and Ukrainian are «not all Cyrillic alphabets»? (I'm Ukrainian).
Language may have some local specifics - Serbians have Ћ, which all other Cyrillic-using languages do not have. You have І instead of И, etc.
This is different from è, é, ë, and ê in French where these are all e, but with different diacritics.
I guess "ь" has more right to be called diacritic, because it genuinely has 1 purpose: altering the other sounds. But even that is treated as a separate letter.
It's nothing like diacritics in French, German or even Latvian, let alone Arabic.
> "Ё" is a bit more tricky, but nevertheless — there's no another letter in Russian alphabet we could put umlaut on and get the result similar to putting umlaut on "е".
This is a bizarre distinction: diacritics in natural languages aren't supposed to be freely recombinable.
That may be the reason for misunderstanding. In my language (Slovak), diacritic is not used to "write less". It is used to express different sounds, i.e. s = с, š = ш, c = ц, č = ч.
For someone learning Arabic the letters are the first of many challenging steps. I learned the Arabic letters in 1 day with flashcards. That single day was easy compared with everything that came afterwards. Using a romanized scripts makes all these subsequent steps with grammar and accents much harder.
I can see how this would be helpful in accurately learning new accents, but accents are notoriously inaccurate and flexible, the Arabic letters leave that flexibility, outside of academic text Romanized letters would require so many exceptions that it be like nailing jello to a wall.
It would be useful for news organizations if this system was applied across many languages so that we can always spell and pronounce names correctly.
The use of non-english keyboard letters creates complexity. I much prefer the use of number replacements for letters that teens use when texting. sa7?