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Aug. 29th, 2006 12:58 pmyay, people are signing up for the Tempest and Ariellah workshops! It's real!
I don't know how I am going to make it through today. Exhaustion overwhelms. It was disconcerting to find it still dark outside when my alarm went off this morning. I am looking forward to Najmat's class tonight, but my split-open toe is still killing me. I ran out of liquid bandage so my toe is currently held together with a gob of neosporin and a band-aid, though I don't expect the band-aid will hold up very well in class. Ah well. We're doing more double cane, I think. It's amusing how easy one cane seems when you've been trying to work with two at a time.
I did the first half-hour lesson of the Pimsleur colloquial Egyptian Arabic short series last night. I think if I hadn't previously had that semester of Arabic, I would have been quite lost. I'm not sure that this 100 percent aural method is going to work for me, but I'll give it a shot. I am embarrassed to say that I have never really learned to speak another language--I took Latin from junior high school through college, before the more recent educational trend towards having students speak it like any other language. I can say some things in French after living in Montreal, but I always feel like I'm faking it. So this will be an interesting experiment. One thing that bothers me is that a couple of words sound distinctly different as pronounced by the male and female speaker--not just the appropriate gender changes, I know about those, but some of the actual consonants are tough to identify. One word, when the man says it it sounds like it starts with a "t" but when the woman says it it sounds like it starts with a "b." At that point in the lesson I very much wanted to see the word in Arabic writing so that I would know for sure what Arabic letter it started with.
A side effect of watching Egyptian movies is that when I repeat the phrases in the language lesson, I feel like a glamorously made up woman from the 1950s, since I suppose most of the women I have seen speaking Egyptian Arabic are either in the movies or are Dina. I repeat "I don't understand" and the world goes black and white and melodramatic and I prepare to either slap a man or kiss him, or perhaps storm out the door to lose myself in the nightclubs of Cairo.
I don't know how I am going to make it through today. Exhaustion overwhelms. It was disconcerting to find it still dark outside when my alarm went off this morning. I am looking forward to Najmat's class tonight, but my split-open toe is still killing me. I ran out of liquid bandage so my toe is currently held together with a gob of neosporin and a band-aid, though I don't expect the band-aid will hold up very well in class. Ah well. We're doing more double cane, I think. It's amusing how easy one cane seems when you've been trying to work with two at a time.
I did the first half-hour lesson of the Pimsleur colloquial Egyptian Arabic short series last night. I think if I hadn't previously had that semester of Arabic, I would have been quite lost. I'm not sure that this 100 percent aural method is going to work for me, but I'll give it a shot. I am embarrassed to say that I have never really learned to speak another language--I took Latin from junior high school through college, before the more recent educational trend towards having students speak it like any other language. I can say some things in French after living in Montreal, but I always feel like I'm faking it. So this will be an interesting experiment. One thing that bothers me is that a couple of words sound distinctly different as pronounced by the male and female speaker--not just the appropriate gender changes, I know about those, but some of the actual consonants are tough to identify. One word, when the man says it it sounds like it starts with a "t" but when the woman says it it sounds like it starts with a "b." At that point in the lesson I very much wanted to see the word in Arabic writing so that I would know for sure what Arabic letter it started with.
A side effect of watching Egyptian movies is that when I repeat the phrases in the language lesson, I feel like a glamorously made up woman from the 1950s, since I suppose most of the women I have seen speaking Egyptian Arabic are either in the movies or are Dina. I repeat "I don't understand" and the world goes black and white and melodramatic and I prepare to either slap a man or kiss him, or perhaps storm out the door to lose myself in the nightclubs of Cairo.
