Nov 05 2007
language learning update, 5 November 2007
Well, these past couple of weeks I’ve been really busy–or rather, life has been crazy and I’ve been disorganized. Because of that, I haven’t been trying AS hard to learn Arabic, so I feel I’ve been improving in certain areas while not improving (or maybe getting a bit worse) in other areas. I feel like I constantly have to be running through dozens of hoops in Arabic 201, and I’ll admit I’ve missed a few of them, but I have been consistent about doing the news listenings and the news articles. And, I feel that my listening comprehension has been improving. When I first moved into the Arabic house, I couldn’t understand a single word that my roommate would say! Now, I feel that I can catch half or even most of it. I definitely can tell Arabic apart from any other languages very quickly. And in the news listenings, I will catch words and phrases, like “The Kurdistan Worker’s Party” or “the Israeli Prime minister, Ehud Olmert,” etc. However, as far as speaking, I think I’ve been going backwards a bit. And my reading and writing doesn’t seem to be changing much.
How to change all this? Well, I have a couple of ideas. First, of course, is to do the Arabic homework more promptly than I’ve been doing. Second is to make more of an effort around the Arabic house to speak ONLY in Arabic (we all seem to have been having problems with that recently). Third, I’ve got a good friend named Malek who is in the ELC, and we hang out about twice or three times a week. Every time I go over there, I have a chance to practice my Arabic and I always learn a few new words. I could really get better if I’d spend more time hanging out with him. Fourth, I’ve still got the Book of Mormon Stories book, and I haven’t finished it. If I spent some more time reading it, I think it would help out a lot. I’ve noticed that reading from that book has helped out A TON in what I’m studying now, because I would constantly running into words, roots, and grammatical patterns that we’re only learning about now. Fifth, I’d like to get a study group together at the FLSR to read the Book of Mormon in Arabic. I think that if we all just got together half an hour before dinner, it could work out really well. I’ve noticed that reading the Book of Mormon really does help with casing and vowelling, even if the vocab is a little bit obscure.
So, I plan on working a lot more on Arabic in the next couple of days, inshallah!