Categories: linguistics, study
Date: 09 October 2006 23:43:28
I started classes again last night: and I have forgotten quite a bit. But luckily last night was revision, of the alphabet and a few phrases, so I didn't feel I was too much out of my depth. Though I'm still struggling with the pronunciation of a few of the letters: insha'allah (God willing), I'll get there in the end.
Our teacher is from Egypt, so we got to here a few Egyptian colloquial phrases. We also learnt some more formal expressions for "How are you?" and "I am fine" which I don't recall learning last year time: we focused on the Lebanese dialect then. Like Nejmeh, my former teaher, Nahla has a great sense of humour and makes the class very interesting: the two-and-a-half hours flew by: so fast in fact she forgot about the break!
The class is an interesting mix of people: a mix of ages, of backgrounds, though a higher predominance of Anglos compared to my former class, and of reasons for learning Arabic.
I'm looking forward to next week and the continuing study of this fascinating language.