Still having a rough time mentally and emotionally, so my language study has been down overall these past few weeks, but I’m still going.
Spanish
Not much to report on. I finished the week 11 reading for La Ciudad de las Bestias, and listened to a little more Radio Ambulante.
(I’m forcing myself to wait until I’ve made progress in the book club before I can update this log, haha)
Arabic
I think I’ve had three lessons since my last update? So far, in addition to some basic greetings and simple exchanges, we’ve covered masculine and feminine nouns (singular, dual, and plural), including a few broken plurals (irregular plural), personal pronouns, numbers 0-19, and most of the alphabet.
My Anki deck is still trucking along, though I have to add quite a few words manually, and it’s not always easy to find audio for them. My teacher actually sent an audio recording of him pronouncing the words for 0-10, so I chopped that up in Audacity and inserted those clips on my Anki cards for the numbers instead of fetching the audio from Forvo.
Unfortunately the Arabic decks I have for Yomitan right now aren’t a whole lot of use, so I don’t think the decks that are currently available provide much support for Levantine dialects specifically.
I’d like to at some point find a better dictionary that I can reference, but I’m not sure what kinds of options are available to me in terms of quick lookups. But that’s a “down the line” problem, haha, as right now I’m just focusing on learning the words that are being taught to me directly.
Some interesting stuff I’ve learned: Palestinian Arabic doesn’t really use the “th” sounds that are in the Arabic alphabet (ث and ذ). This is convenient for me haha because I was having trouble differentiating them.
Also, unfortunately, there is currently no way in Palestinian Arabic to refer to an individual who uses they/them pronouns. I asked my Egyptian friend if the same was true of Egyptian Arabic, and she said unfortunately yes. None of her fellow queer Arab friends are nonbinary, so she’s not sure what people use in that situation.
During that conversation, another friend linked The Queer Arab Glossary, which is a book that just came out! I’m planning on getting a copy at some point, because it looks super cool! It has over 300 words from a variety of dialects, including Levantine dialects.
Learning Arabic is already paying off! I watched Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi’s Palestine course, and when I tuned in for the last session, I realized I was able to understand all of the greetings Dr. Rabab said at the beginning, and was also able to understand a tiny bit of Arabic spoken later in the video (for this session, several of the panelists did their portion in Arabic, which Dr. Rabab translated afterward) when Sana’ Daqqa’s daughter Milad joined her for a bit haha and Dr. Rabab asked the child “كيفِك؟” (“How are you?”).
I’m honestly really glad that I started learning Arabic despite everything else I have going on. Learning a language is very grounding, and it helps me stay connected to parts of the world that I am geographically distant from.
I guess I’ll end today with a couple songs that my teacher recommended we listen to! One of them is Ana Dammi Falastini (My blood is Palestinian) by Mohammad Assaf, a famous Palestinian singer from Gaza. The other is Kifak Inta by Fairoz, one of the most famous Arab singers.
