Obsessing Over the Problem

When it comes to developing a product there is something real about obsessing over the problem. Not focusing on the anticipated solutions, but getting so intimate with the problem that the solution becomes clear as day. I've had the great joy of obsessing over my most recent product: Glyph.

Why I Get Obsessed?

Its interesting to think a little deeper on why I get obsessive over things in my life. It stems from something a little more innate in my human nature. It boils down to two things: an unending curiosity and a desire for things to be better. The largest living example of this in in the way I approach my own life. Here are examples of all the opportunities I saw in my own life. I was overweight, I didn't know how to dance, I couldn't surf, I was spiritually weak, I was emotionally immature, I never studied the classics, I couldn't repair a car, I've never made an app, I don't know anything about software development, and many other shortcomings. I love having these shortcomings. They are what make waking up every day exciting and different. Without a shortcoming, there cannot be a goal, and without a goal, there is nothing to strive for. I love striving to make change whether its in my life or for everyone else's. The road being uncertain is the best part, its what allows an obsession to change direction and find new pathways. Sometimes I didn't even know it was a problem until it revealed itself. Me realizing I didn't know how to dance came while I was training for a Spartan race and deciding to do one dance class on my rest week before competition. Problems mean one thing to me, there is an opportunity for growth. Whether that growth is individual or in a product, that obsession stays at the center.

When building products, I see the product not as a fancy device or tool, but as a means to best solve the problem. In my own life I constantly operate trying the best methods to solve my problems. When dieting a certain way isn't working I don't tell myself the solution is right for the problem, I go back to the problem. If I do a low carb diet, but my problem is I eat candy every night, maybe my diet could be simpler, a no candy diet. Returning to the problem is always going to be the route to the solution. For a product, if I get too focused on the solution, I will 100% lose track if I am solving the actual problem. The best way to prevent this is to always stay obsessed with the problem.

Backstory

To understand Glyph we have to dive past the last 6 months and into my own personal life. I come from a mixed immigrant family. My mom's side are Armenian Egyptians and my dad's side are Coptic Egyptians. Being born and growing up in the United States I had a mixed, at times, confusing identity. I am 100% American. When my friends need an example of a classic Southern Californian native, I fit the description to the tee. At the same time, I've grown up with this rich but at times disconnected cultural identity of being Egyptian. The Egyptian identity can be so cool. We always have large family gatherings for even the smallest celebration. There is a closeness amongst family members and a deep tie to the culture that came from Egypt. The tangible things like music, food, and dance. Then the intangible things like values, traditions, and communication. I have family all over the world and the part that connects us all together is the fact that we all carry that shared Egyptian identity.

Before I was born, my parents attempted talking to my sister in Arabic. Due to her childhood stubborness she refused to acknowledge the language and only responded to English. By the time I was born, my parents weren't too focused on speaking the language with us. Growing up I definitely heard a lot of arabic. Common household items like table or chair. Beverages like tea or water. The fridge, wanting something, asking why, asking what, etc. I heard a lot of vocabulary over the years, but there was nothing ever to piece it together. A chief frustration with Egyptian Arabic is there is no academic class for it. Its a spoken dialect, not a written language. People may use it to write social media posts or blogs, but the official written language of Egypt is MSA. This is noticeably different than what the people speak. The MSA class would get me no closer to speaking to my grandma. No matter how much I searched, I could not find a class or app that would teach me the spoken form end to end.

My Recent 6 Month Journey

I voiced my frustrations with the language, but why did I never make an attempt in the past. Its two major reasons intertwined. My motivation was weak, I did not have a huge desire while in high school or college to learn the language. The secondary reason is I never saw a real path to learning. If I really wanted to learn Spanish, there are many resources available. There are talking groups, acadamic classes, many private tutors, infinite written material. Its less a factor of can you learn it and more are you willing to put the time in. With Arabic, the closest I got was an Aunt telling me she is going to teach me. Then that evening throwing in 5 Arabic words and never following up with it. If you look at the classic language apps there is no Egyptian Arabic and written material tends to be for MSA or require reading arabic script.

Then, I had this opportunity, I started my own research lab to work on an STTR. As the contract was wrapping up, my mom reminded me of my aunt's friend who teaches Egyptian Arabic. I had no excuse at this point of time. I had a desire to learn and I had the time to do it. I said yes and started doing lessons once a week.

What you find out after starting lessons, you can't progress much if you don't do anything in between lessons. Also, my tutor isn't a certified language specialist, but just a person who wants to teach. I didn't have homework and believe it or not, I really needed homework. In between lessons I was just told to review the words I learned that day. However, performing blank memorization although possible, didn't feel fruitful. It wasn't getting me any closer to my actual goal: having a conversation.

I wasn't learning arabic to know vocabulary, I wanted to learn so I can talk to my grandma. I wanted to learn so that I can visit Egypt and get real cultural immersion. I became motivated by my love of culture and language and thankfully this motivation continues to strengthen as I continue learning.

I outlined my one and only goal, to converse, but what was out there. My tutor's mentality was learn all the arabic letters and then there are slightly more resources avaiable to learn, but the reality is Egyptian Arabic is not a written language. People write books in MSA not the spoken dialect. I felt extremely discouraged to chase learning the script to eventually not understand the reading material that would be available. There are scattered videos on youtube and instagram some of which useful, but to make a curriculum, not very useful. The only major language learning app I saw with the Egpytian dialect was Pimsleur, but I tried it in the past, and it just wasn't something I stuck with. I found a few resources that were smaller teaching Egyptian Arabic, but none have the vision of teaching for a learner. Its the same story scattered learning content. Do waht you feel like. No clear way of connecting it all together. The problem here wasn't in specific resources being available, but that there was no real curriculum. I wanted a curriculum. Something if I stuck with it I would be at a certain level. Something that says if I put in the work, I can get to specific goals. With proven milestones throughout to prove it.

My Approach

We have to start back to something that happened when I was 8. My grandparents were applying for citizenship and stayed with us throughout the process. During this time I used to go on walks with them around our neighborhood. My grandpa must have known my love for learning so he started teaching me arabic on our walks. He taught me the numbers, colors, and everyday items. Before he left to return to Egypt, he left me a handwritten list of common arabic words in English script with the English translation next to it. Now, a few decades later, this is core to my product. Franco Arabic unlocks the language without needing to spend weeks learning how to read and write in it.

At first I was just doing my class once a week. I would be immersed in the language for an hour. During class I would write down every word we went over in franco arabic., Throughout the week, I would just try to recall what I remember and write it down again. That was my studying. This method was awful to say the least. I do remember words many of which aren't of any value to me. Astika = eraser, ananas = pinapple, botaroh = cow. As I have now been practicing speaking, I haven't had a need to use one of these words. This was a core insight early on. I need to selective on what I spend time memorizing. I want the next word I choose to memorize to be the next most important one. Learning how to say "and" is infinitely more useful than the word "unicorn". Learning "happy" is more useful than "devious". I can learn 1000 words in arabic and not be any closer to speaking if I spent all my time learning obscure words.

The second realization I had. I wanted to learn how to talk. This is how my conversations in arabic looked before I started learning.

Izzayak? - How are you?
Ana kwayyis - I'm good
Wa enta? = And you?

It really didn't matter what they said back because I wouldn't understand a lick of it or even come up with a response. Now I could respond very brokenly at least I imagine I can.

...
Ana kwayyis ewwey - I'm really good
Eh haga kont kwayyis? - What thing has been good?

Ideally I would have responded saying something with the right words and better grammar, but I'm using my vocabulary. So instead of asking What has been good lately? I get to the closest form of the question that my vocabulary has. The important note here is I have been learning how to talk. I care about learning how to keep a conversation going. Learning how to express my feelings and emotions. To me the current biggest unlock is utilizing connectors: and, or, but, because, then, etc. These allow me to express my more complex thoughts without a thousand I statements. The next big unlock I am reaching for is leaving the I statement. I want to be able to speak a little closer to the way I naturally engage with rhetoric like the way I talk in this blog. My sentences aren't always - I like food, I want a car because I need to drive to work, I go running for exercise - my sentences usually have a lot of diversity in them. This is my second major learning goal, to grow my conversational capabiliy.

What I Am Building

There is a lot to unpack in this entire writing, but I'll summarize the core of it so far. There aren't many resources for Egyptian Arabic, learning Egpytian Arabic by raw memorization wouldn't get me closer to speaking, and three major things are needed to get to conversational fluency: important words, important conversational capabilities, and practicing it verbally. The big problem is there is no single resource that does this. Everything is so scattered for this language. That is why I decided to build Glyph.

When I was first coming to these realizations, I was using what seems to be the best resource out there for teaching, an LLM. I started talking to it as a coach to teach me how to conjugate verbs and learn new words. It helped me identify a lot of patterns. Did I need AI for this, people may have been able to do it, but it was the only resource I had that thought like a system rather than by feelings. When I think about English I don't know the patterns since the language is so natural to me, but there are many. For verbs we see:

I eat
you eat
he eats
she eats
they eat
we eat
I sleep
you sleep
he sleeps
etc

In a much more complicated format this exists in arabic, but it requires pattern recognition. If you had to memorize every conjugation as if it was its own word in arabic it would be about 36 words. That was how it felt at the beginning and I remember talking to my dad and he almost convinced me that the patterns didn't really work based of the way he was looking at it. Its hard to see what words belong to what pattern group until i dived deeper.

This is my first pattern example, but the reason I want to learn these patterns is to tailor what I memorize first. If I waste 200 words on learning 6 verbs that would be a waste of time. If I learn the 100 most useless words in the langauge it would also be a waste of time. I'm treating language learning like all the problems I've encountered in my life, an opportunity for growth. So I started building an app catered towards the parts I felt needed to be taught. It was firmly rooted in one concept: adaptive learning.

Most apps out there have a set curriculum. You start at a certain level and you just keep going from there. Chances are even if you studied Spanish in high school if you used Duolingo, you would need to start from the beginning because you don't remember their beginner curriculum, you just know what you know. On the other end I see AI apps that are conversational tutors. I like this idea a lot more, but I still feel the curriculum on that is too loose. That concept starts taking flight once the user has a strong enough base to build on.

So what was going to make my app different. I know my eventual users intimately because I'm one of them. They are people who have been around the language for years, but were never able to put it together. The arabic alphabet frightens them and looks like a bunch of swiggles and dots. Their family speaks the langauge, but they feel disjointed from family conversations. This user reaches beyond just the arabic learner, but across the entire spread of immigrant descendants in America. My app is built for them.

How I've built it

The road from idea to product is a lot further when there is a lot of ambiguity involved. I had my vision; an app that would teach conversational capabilities and the most important words in a sequential order, but how do you build this app. To me the most important thing was learner memory. I want my app to know what the user has done and is still trying to remember. This is critical because I don't want it to rush ahead until they both understand the concept and words being used. It also makes it so that if a user comes in at a higher skill level, we can seed in their memory to have them start exactly where they are versus skipping lessons to try and match their general capability.

The next thing I was focused on was conversations. I wanted the app to feel like understanding conversational exchanges, not learning the months or numbers or odd phrases, but teaching using conversation. I want the user to express how he or she feels. I want the user to know how to say questions. I want the user to understand talking in past tense versus present or future. So my entire app was built around the idea of conversational exchanges.

My app isn't just AI. AI is an additive feature that improves the app, rather than being the curriculum. I'm hand building the curriculum and using AI to enhance it. The beauty of this system is that I've been doing this as I've learned. My major breakthroughs have come as I've built this app. Debugging my app has taught me a lot of vocabulary and conversation capabilities. I think about this app all the time. I go on a walk and a brainstorm how to best adapt what I currently have to make it work better.

My goal is for this to be a curriculum for every learner out there like me. Someone that has known the language for all their life but can't speak it. This person can be starting from nothing, or have a strong foundation already, but the goal stays the same. Teach them how to converse in Arabic so they can connect with thier family and culture.