Here’s a slightly overdue study log update:
Spanish
I finished the week 12 reading for La Ciudad de las Bestias, and I’m not sure I got any podcast listening time in? It’s just been too hot, and I’ve been either asleep or too busy during the slightly cooler parts of the day…
Arabic
We’ve had two more lessons since my last update! I can now say numbers 0-99 and have learned attached pronouns! We’ve been practicing super basic sentences using some of the vocabulary we’ve learned.
I’m still not very good at reading—the class so far has been pretty speaking-based (so maybe listening practice will actually be more accessible to me than reading practice, haha).
Here are a couple songs our instructor shared with us: Talat Daqat (Three Heartbeats) (lyric translation here), and this song by famous Lebanese singer Ziad Rahbani (lyric translation here). I really liked this one! I thought the discussion in the comments of the translation was interesting.
Also, my Egyptian friend looked into Egypt’s indie pro wrestling scene and found two promotions with any sort of digital footprint. One is PWO - Pro Wrestling Organisation, and the other is EWR - Egypt Wrestling.
EWR has VODs available on youtube, apparently. Here’s a recent one, with amazing 360p quality.
For a hot second, I considered using these as eventual listening practice haha (they have Arabic commentary), but I think expanding beyond Levantine dialects might have to be a far future goal for me…
The search for a Palestinian pro wrestling scene remains. Maybe if there isn’t any pro wrestling there, I’d have luck finding some from Jordan or from somewhere else that speaks a dialect I might have a slight hope of understanding .