Long time, no update! Mostly I’ve been too busy to spend a lot of time on Spanish, so I haven’t really had much to update on, beyond some scattered thoughts on a few Radio Ambulante episodes, and my comments on the book club book (which I’m trying to keep to the actual threads).
Since my last update, I have finished the week 5, week 6, and week 7 book club readings for La Ciudad de las Bestias!
I also have a new tool:
Finally!! A popup dictionary for Spanish! I installed all the es-en dictionaries and all monolingual Spanish dictionaries available. I’m really pumped to have them; this’ll make it way easier to browse Spanish-language wikipedia and Amazon listings and such.
I also set up a third Yomitan profile, which is for… Arabic!
Long story short: I saw this post on twitter, and I forwarded it to a few of my local Palestinian friends, and we decided to try taking some lessons of Palestinian Arabic as a group because we could get a discount on them with 3-4 people. The others all know a bit of the language, so I’m at a slight disadvantage, but I’m pretty confident in my ability to figure out how to learn a language!
I had sort of toyed with the idea of learning Arabic at some point because I felt like it would balance nicely with English-Spanish-Japanese. But knowing how much time and work it takes to learn a language to any degree of real proficiency, I thought I would probably end up stopping after Spanish and Japanese, so I didn’t really consider it seriously (and Arabic isn’t a huge help for pro wrestling like the other languages are, so I had less of an incentive to want to learn…).
However, circumstances have changed, and now I know several Palestinians who live in my area, including at least one person who isn’t super proficient in English, and I also see a lot of Palestinian Arabic on my social media feed and in the news and such.
So my goal is to make it to A1 level with Palestinian Arabic. Specifically, I want to:
- Be able to read Arabic
- Understand basic grammar and sentence structure and know some core vocabulary
- Be able to have very basic conversations
(I’ll reevaluate at that point whether I want to continue sinking time into learning it.)
It’ll be honestly a totally different focus from my Spanish/Japanese studies because I’ll be taking classes with an actual teacher (assuming we’re able to get the scheduling worked out for that), and presumably will be getting speaking practice and all of that. I don’t know if I’ll even make it to a point where I can really read books.
In preparation for the classes, I’ve been trying to familiarize myself with the alphabet, using my old friend Anki to learn the letters, just how I taught myself hiragana and katakana initially. Here’s the deck I found. I’ve been adding new cards at a rate of about 2-3 letters a day.
The other thing I want to do before the first class is familiarize myself with the pronunciation for all of the sounds. I’d love to find a youtube series or something for that, but haven’t gone looking yet.
I don’t really know what kind of time frame to expect for this. It’ll depend heavily on the schedules of my friends and everyone’s budgets. We might only be able to do the classes during the summer. I’m planning on making the most of the time that we have, but still keeping it on the backburner.
I do actually own an ebook with some Arabic (and a (print) Japanese book with a works cited page that cites some Arabic works, haha). But I anticipate both of those (poetry and primary source research) being quite a bit beyond the level of Arabic proficiency I’m likely to ever reach…
I guess you never know, though!
I certainly never thought I’d reach the point where I’m comfortably intermediate/advanced in Japanese/Spanish!
I’m torn on where exactly to put updates for Arabic (whether here or in my WaniKani Japanese study log). I suppose Natively is probably a better choice, haha, so I’m leaning toward using this study log for Palestinian Arabic as well.
