Faster Fluency Recitation Intensive

But don’t take my word for it - when I asked my readers previously for feedback on their Ramadan recitation habits, here’s what they said:

“I find it difficult to read, as I am not fluent & I stammer a lot. In Ramadan particularly, I really struggle to read a Juz a day.”
“Previous Ramadans I have wanted to complete a reading but have been unable because my fluency was not great and I couldn't keep up with reading a juz a day.”
“It takes me long time to read and then i get frustrated.”

When you open to a random page in the mushaf, it almost seems like a tangle of words, and it takes you way too much time to go through letter by letter and process what you’re seeing.

You might have these awkward pauses in your recitation, as you start, pause, see what’s coming next, then read a bit. And. pause. Again.

It’s really hard for you to get into a flow, when your recitation doesn’t flow. And it takes you literally forever to get through a meaningful portion of the Quran. It’s hard to cover ground when you’re moving really, really, really slowly …

It’s hard for your recitation to sound beautiful if it’s not fluent, but let’s put this one obvious issue aside for now. The bigger problems arise when you recite haltingly, with pauses and hesitation, and it takes you so long that it becomes a barrier to you picking up the mushaf and exploring freely.

If you can't recite fluently, you don't get to experience the variety of beauty in the Quran, because you're limited to enjoying just the few surahs that you are already familiar with. And definitely it's a huge problem if your recitation causes you to get frustrated and then eventually put the mushaf down.

When you open your mushaf to a random page, it all seems like a tangle of words, and it takes time to have to go letter by letter and process everything you’re seeing
When you get to unfamiliar words, you might get discouraged and that slows your pace way down
You might have difficulty moving smoothly from one word to the next, or from one line to the next, leaving these awkward pauses in your recitation
If your fluency is really poor, you might find that your recitation is just a set of stops and starts as you stutter along
Maybe you’ve studied tajweed, but since then your fluency seems to have worsened, as you’re looking out for the Tajweed rules and trying to apply them

So what can you do to improve your fluency? If you've ever asked yourself that, I'm sure you've heard one or more of the following responses: "recite more!" or "listen to Quran more!" or "study tajweed!".

The problem is that while all these methods do work, for many people these might not be the most direct ways to tackle the issue of fluency. Consider this: if your child struggles to read fluently in English, would you enrol them in a class to learn the names of the teeth so that they can perfect their articulation of the letters? Most likely not.

That's not to say that learning tajweed is not important - it definitely is, and a fluent recitation absolutely needs to be grounded in proper tajweed. But for someone struggling to smoothly connect letters into words, and words into phrases, knowing tajweed rules will not help improve their fluency and flow.

These methods work because they increase your exposure to the Quran, and increase your familiarity with the Quran, and expose you to good recitation from a reciter - all of which help over time. But they're not the most direct approach to improving fluency. Tajweed is a broad area of knowledge that covers different topics, and "how to recite more fluently" isn't really one of them.

Again, we find a few common threads: it's hard to read something unfamiliar, it's taking way too long, and it's incredibly frustrating. On top of that, the classic advice of "learn tajweed" and "just read more" is simply not working. In this case, the brother has actually studied tajweed, and people would be surprised to know that he struggles with fluency!

So let's clear up one thing - your eman is not low. It’s perfectly normal to feel discouraged if you’re struggling to recite fluently, especially when it feels like you’re trying but you’re just spinning your wheels, stuck in the same place.

If you’ve ever learned to recite the letters and words from a book like Noorani Qaidah, think of this almost like a Noorani Qaidah part 2 - this is where we take your basic reading skills, and we now work on improving your flow and smoothness while reciting. We’ll work on common words and phrases in the Quran, to help you build familiarity with what you’re seeing, so that you can move more smoothly from one word to the next. We’ll work on guided readings, repeated readings, and timed readings, to help you focus on reading smoothly and boosting your reading speed. And we’ll practice common areas where students get hung up, so that you can begin to process things faster whilst reading.

This isn’t just “read more and you’ll get better one day” - this is deliberate, structured practice along with personalized feedback on your recitation, to help you fasttrack your way to a fluent recitation.

Think of a child learning to read - for example in English. When we tell a child to read more, the reality is that they're reading age-appropriate books, or books that are based on a certain reading level. So they're not just diving in and reading anything - rather there's a "program" if we can call it that, designed to help them progress and build up familiarity with words, phrases, and sentence construction.

Contrast this with how you might approach the Quran when someone tells you to read more: you might start from surah al-baqarah and keep reading from there, or you might just jump in and try to recite from anywhere. That's awesome (reading Quran is always a good thing) but the difficulty is that there's no structure there, like there would be if a child was reading age-appropriate material. So you open up to a page, and maybe you start hitting some very unfamiliar words, which slows down your pace and leaves you discouraged.

It becomes way easier to stick to surahs you're already familiar with, rather than to explore freely in unfamiliar territory. So you're back at square one - you continue reciting the surahs you know, and you never seem able to get over that invisible barrier that keeps you from reciting smoothly and fluently.

In this program, we'll guide you through what you really need - deliberate practice: focused, specific, structured, repeated practice that is designed to help you build up familiarity. For example practicing common words in the Quran, or common phrases. There are a lot of these phrases and word groups that come together many, many times in the Quran. If you work specifically on these, you're naturally going to fast-track your fluency, even if there are some difficult or uncommon words here and there.

Words and phrases are just two examples of this. From my experience as an instructor, I've found that there are several other areas where students commonly struggle and tend to get slowed down. For example, think of some English words like construction, instruction, nutrition, etc - words ending in "tion". Do you actually sit there and read "t-i-o-n" letter by letter? Hopefully not - your brain recogizes that particular set of letters, and knows how to process them without much active thought.

I've found, from years of teaching a wide variety of students, that there are common areas where students get hung up. For example joining words when there's a pesky hamzatul-wasl in between. If you recite fluently, you barely notice that it's there - but for students who are struggling, its presence often brings a lot of confusion. This is something we can - and will - pull out and practice in a focused manner, so that when you get back to reading, it's just like the letters "tion" - you've seen it before and you can process it without much thought.

These are things that you most likely don't even realize are slowing you down, and they're not topics that traditionally fall under any tajweed course.

For the first portion of the course (7 weeks): the main daily assignments (5 times per week) will be delivered via the course website - you can log in and do these exercises at your own convenience. There are no sessions that you must attend at fixed times. These are short exercises, approx 20-30 mins per day, designed to give you regular, ongoing practice to improve your fluency
These daily assignments will be mostly audio, but some days there might be short videos or even just text based prompts - for example me providing instructions for what you should practice that day. The focus here is on you working on specific exercises to build your fluency, not on me lecturing per se.

Here, we switch gears - for the rest of the program, we’ll have weekly small group reading sessions (approx 6-8 students per group). Here’s where you get to recite to a teacher (Qari Idrees and/or other qualified instructors) who can give you immediate feedback and help you break through any sticking points in your recitation.
Instead of the short daily practice,you’ll have bigger weekly reading assignments that you’ll need to work on. Whereas the previous two months had you working on specific exercises, here you’ll be integrating everything and working through full pages. Then you come to your live reading session once per week and recite to your instructor. Often there are a few big things holding you back in your recitation, or perhaps you’re making mistakes that you can’t really figure out on your own, so it helps to recite to a teacher to really pinpoint these issues for you to work on.
These reading sessions (1 hr long) will take place at a variety of times to cater to different time zones and schedules. Towards the end of October, we will set the schedule for these sessions. Don’t worry, we’ll have a variety of times available so that we can accommodate everyone.

We've called this an Intensive, if only to convey that that you need to dedicate time, energy, and commitment throughout this program in order to see results. This program is structured so that you get ongoing, regular practice over the course of several months, which is key to building familiarity and improving your recitation fluency.
At the same time, this is not meant to be too intense and overwhelming. We know that you might be busy with other things - school, kids, work, you name it - so we’ve built breaks into this program to make it easy to manage
There are two off-weeks in the program: the last week of October (Oct 28 - Nov 3) and the final week of the year (Dec 30 - Jan 5).

Registration is currently closed. Thanks for your interest!

Current students: kindly use the login link at the top right to access the students' course area.

Many students are struggling to recite fluently!

If you're not reciting fluently, you know that the struggle is real:

Perhaps you’ve experienced this for yourself?

I'm sure you've heard this advice ...

Why "just recite more" can sometimes backfire

Check out this email a brother recently sent me:

Nobody talks about how difficult this can be emotionally for you!

What if you were able to finally recite with fluency?

What if you could recite without stuttering, almost as easily as you read in English?

What if you could smoothly and easily transition from one word to the next, without a ton of mental effort or short, awkward pauses?

What if you could finally recite unfamiliar passages without hesitation, almost as though you’ve seen it before?

What if you could finally get over your fear of opening to surahs you haven't read before?

Introducing the ...

Sept 10, 2018 to Jan 31, 2019

Introducing the Faster Fluency Recitation Intensive, a five-month program (Sept 10, 2018 - Jan 31, 2019) that will help you recite with greater fluency and flow.

You need deliberate practice - not just more reading

Here's what we'll do together:

Here’s how the Faster Fluency program works:

Part I: Guided Exercises (Sept & Oct)

Part II: Recitation Sessions (Nov, Dec, Jan)

Intensive, but not too intense!