Hey, guess what! I’m not just learning German now, I’m learning Arabic, too! I am not entirely sure how that came about other than that Arabic is another language that’s been at the top of my list to learn for many, many years. And I expect Arabic to be quite useful if what I want to do is be working in some sort of international capacity at some point.
I am not giving up German, by any means. I’ve just found German, thus far, to be very easy and something I can continue to teach myself for awhile until I’m ready to move onto more advanced lessons. Arabic is NOT something I really want to teach myself!
My plan, as of right now, is that I will register for Arabic 101 – 103 this year. (I’m already registered for 101 for this upcoming quarter.) All through this quarter, I will continue going through the lessons in the German language learning text that is used for all the German classes at UW, as well as refreshing my Spanish through the Spanish text. After some refreshing, I’m going to take the Spanish placement test (so that I have it on my record for the future) and hoping I’ll test into either level 3 or the middle of level 2. Then I will also take placement for German before next Summer quarter, hoping to place into level 2. I plan on taking Arabic 200 level intensive as well as German intensive next Summer.
I’ve been teaching myself German for the past couple of months now. For the past few weeks, I’ve been spending some time every morning doing German, Spanish, and Arabic lessons online (DuoLingo, Memrise) plus using the books. Today, I picked up some books at the library to help me begin mastering the Arabic alphabet.
If I told you that I just love languages and it’s always been my one great passion… well, that would be significantly understating it.
Indo-European languages come pretty easily to me. I wanted to learn a new language that was NOT Indo-European and that would challenge me in a new way. I ordered the required texts for Arabic classes a few weeks ago and when the main text arrived… well. I KNOW that Arabic reads right to left, but my brain took some time to process it. It took me two minutes to open the book because I kept flipping it around the wrong way!
So far, on Memrise, I recognize all of the letters I’ve been through so far. I understand the concept of there being different forms of a letter (like when it’s placed at the end of a word, the beginning, or a single letter, etc). But I’m having a hard time differentiating if there’s a SOUND difference, depending on where the letter is placed. There might not be, this might just be a flaw in Memrise – I’ve noticed it in other languages. But I don’t know yet.
It’s so hard for me to focus on just one language or even two. There are SO MANY I want to learn. I want to learn every language in the world. Spanish, German, and Arabic will be the most useful for me as of now. But I also plan on doing something with Latin later (more for personal reasons and fun.) If I could, I’d also learn Portugues and Turkish. But… one step at a time…!