Small update! I’m about to have a busy and somewhat stressful week, so I’m not sure I’ll get much language study done in the next few days.
Spanish
I finished the week 8 reading for La Ciudad de las Bestias! I’d hoped to catch up a little more, but… well, I’ll take what I can get, at this point.
I’ve been listening to Radio Ambulante as usual! Definitely doing more listening than reading, as of late.
Arabic
We met with Ahmed, the Palestinian Arabic instructor that I mentioned in my last post! We now have a time and date scheduled for our lessons, so it is officially Happening!!
It’ll still be a while yet before we start, though, as one of my friends will be going on vacation soon, so we decided to start in early July. But I’m excited! I think probably the class will focus a bit more on speaking than the other skills, as that’s what one of my friends is most interested in learning, but we’re all pretty open to learn whatever.
Ahmed seems really nice, and he says he teaches the culture along with the language, which I’m especially looking forward to. He worked with Project Hope before the war, but his old job is sort of indefinitely on hold, which is why he’s teaching Arabic online now.
I’m really glad I saw that tweet and decided to ask my friends if they wanted to do this with me, because I feel like it’s an opportunity we might never get again. Despite the awful circumstances that led to this happening, I’m glad we can get something positive and restorative out of it.
Ahmed said that with Palestinian Arabic, we should be able to communicate pretty easily with people from Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, but it’s apparently pretty different from Egyptian Arabic. He said Palestinians can understand most of Egyptian Arabic (largely just due to having more exposure to it through like movies and such), but it’s often harder for Egyptians to understand Palestinian Arabic.
I actually have an Egyptian friend, and she commented “شكراً يا أمورة” after something I commented today, and I was about to be like “I haven’t learned enough to meaningfully read that 
” but then I remembered I had Arabic on Yomitan now, so I was able to read the first two words, but not the last.
My friend said it’s Egyptian slang (“amoora”), and it comes from “amore” (Italian for love) and also sounds like “amar” (Arabic for moon). It’s a pet name, haha.
I’ll probably end up asking her “do you say this in Egypt?” about random things I learn in my class 
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In any case, to sum up my progress so far:
I’ve (tentatively) learned the alphabet through Anki! I have all the cards in circulation, at least; I still make plenty of mistakes on the reviews 
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I also watched this video on Arabic alphabet pronunciation. I’m going to keep trying to work on that (and the alphabet itself) before our first class.
Ahmed said that he’ll give us homework after each lesson, haha, including vocab to memorize, so I’ll be putting that into Anki (and will try to teach my local friends how to use Anki, probably, lol). I’m unsure if I’ll have to reduce my Japanese flash card load to make up for this or not. I suppose it’ll depend on how many Arabic words I get given each week to memorize.
