My Arabic Class

Well, the weekend is finally here, which means you are all owed a post about what I did during the week.

On Monday, I took the placement test. For Arabic, almost any place that instructs in English will use one textbook series, and in that series there are three books: Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. The program J and I are in now divides each book into three seperate classes: I, II, and III.

Last semester I covered the first three chapters of the Intermediate, but that ended in May. What with getting married, moving to a different continent, and then moving again, I have to say that my Arabic has suffered.

These are a few of the knicknacks placed around the school
we're attending.

So we were nervous that I wouldn't be placed high enough. In many ways, I probably didn't go into the test deserving to be placed at Intermediate I or II. So I was very nervous when I ended up in a room with six other people who were also taking placement tests.

Fortunately, God is good, and students everywhere are uniformly ill prepared. After a test and a discussion group with the other students being placed, I ended up in Intermediate II. While all of the other (three) people in my class seem to have some Arabic skills which I don't have, they also all seem to have some areas where they need to be whipped into shape.

Class, as you might remember, is divided into two parts. Two hours before the tea break, and an hour and a half after it. Our teacher, H, never explained the format of the class, but as nearly as I can tell, the first half is dedicated to discussion and the second half is dedicated to covering material in the textbook.

That sounds straightforward, right? Well, if so, I'm not doing a good job of explaining how class actually goes. In the middle of the discussion, H might start giving a long explanation of a grammar rule. While covering material from the book, he might ask us what we think about what we're reading.

This little courtyard is one of the first things you see when
you walk into our school.

So, for example, on Friday we talked (in Arabic) about the role of the media in the Arab Spring. This sounds impressive, and I'm hoping in a month or two it will be, but for now it means taking turns at expressing  relatively simple ideas to the other people in the class. So for instance, H (who often seems to play the devil's advocate in these discussions), said that he thought the media was a negative influence because they often spread false information. I responded, "The true information which is published is more important than the false information." That sounds good until you take into account how long it took me (a minute or two at least) to stumble that out.

Still, I'm not really frustrated. As someone interested in academia, I've grown accustomed to the idea that success only comes after you have payed your dues (five years of dues for undergrad, six years of dues to get the PhD...). My Arabic is rusty now, but that rust is already starting to be shaken off, and if I have twenty hours of Arabic a week for several months, the conversations in my classes will get much more fluid and interesting.

And that's why I'm doing all this. J loves the process of learning a language and the thrill of success (among other things, to be sure). There's some of that for me, but really it's about opening the doors and windows on the minds of other people. What did Moroccan diplomats think about four hundred years ago? What do Moroccan scholars think today? I'm thrilled that soon I hope to be able to converse fluidly in Arabic, but really the thing that makes me happiest about it is being able to converse fluidly.