For full-time Quran students, any other subject combined with the memorisation must facilitate the Quran studies and not impede them. That is, you need to assess yourself first and see how much you already know about the religion, and then take up the courses accordingly. It is best not to enrol in a long course at the earlier stages of your memorisation as that will interfere with your revision, new hifdh, etc.
Ideally, you should be able to give your full attention to Quran and the subject of Tajweed, at the start. This means learning the proper Tajweed, meanings and definitions of the terms used in Arabic to explain the rules, applying the rules and giving the in-depth study of Tajweed no more than 2-4 months at the start.
After that, you should be able to move on from this subject to the one that explains the meaning of the words of the Quran: Tarjuma/Translation. This doesn’t mean that you are not allowed to learn the meaning of the Quran prior to studying Tajweed, you can still get a general translation of the verses that you are memorising and picture the meaning during revision.
Tajweed is one of the easiest subject to undertake and finish but the learners keep dragging their recitation/memorisation with tajweed for months, and at worst, for years with no end in sight. It does NOT take ages to master tajweed- it DOES require focus on your part and this is where most people fail. They spread their Islamic studies in every direction and fail to grasp the essentials of Tajweed.
If you find yourself in this position where you are stuck with the subject that teaches the art of recitation, then you need to take the following steps:
1- Start with al-Qaidah an-Nuraniyah and read it to someone qualifed who can correct your mistakes.
2- Review the shorter Surahs with proper Tajweed and make sure you have no major mistakes (makharij, tashkeel/harakat..), and note down the minor mistakes for future <— these will take time and more practice like the major rules but can be overlooked at the start.
3- Do NOT be lazy, do NOT make excuses, and do NOT have too many distractions around you.
The last point is meant for those who have so many things going on in their day that even if they grasp the rules, they fail to implement them due to lack of practice. The only way you can master the rules is by practising and giving Quran time. Whether it takes cutting time off social media or reducing the number of things you do in a day, do what you can to make time for Quran and fix your mistakes. Do NOT move forward without this step, otherwise, your mistakes will accumulate and it’ll be very, very hard to fix them unless you restart everything, so don’t waste time or energy.
Once you are through this stage, it will be easier to decide which subjects to study and you will have room for further studies which will be discussed in another post.
Need details of the course
This is a series of posts on Qur’an, I’ll start a Qur’an course related to this in 2019 in sha Allah