Fallynleaf's Spanish/Palestinian Arabic study log

Spanish
41

Another overdue study log update! This one is overdue because I was neglecting the book club (due to a combination of being very busy and also very depressed), but I did finally finish another week’s reading.

Spanish

Finished the week 13 reading for La Ciudad de las Bestias! I also said I wasn’t going to do the next book club because I’m so behind on this last one, then my nomination Mentirosa | L30?? got picked, so I might end up unable to resist joining :joy_cat:.

That one looks super easy, though, so I’m hoping it’ll be like the other YA romances I read in Spanish and not take me much longer to read than if I were reading in English. No amazon rain forest words to have to look up in this one, probably!

Arabic

I had maybe one more lesson after my last update, but then we had to put our lessons on pause due to IRL stuff on our end, so I haven’t had a lesson in three weeks. We may or may not have one next week? It’ll depend on if my friend is able to make it.

Unfortunately, things have also gotten a lot harder for our teacher, because he lives in Nablus, and Israel has been increasing its violence in the West Bank… He said that he’s okay so far, though things have been tough. I really hope that he doesn’t end up forced out of his home or killed…

So I guess things are more up in the air right now, and there’s a chance that we might not be able to continue our lessons, but I’m crossing my fingers that things will work out.

I asked our teacher for some more song/movie recommendations in the meantime, and he sent me a long list of them, so I’ll try to share some of those in here after I’ve had more time to go through them.

4 Likes
42

Had some very bad depression months, but I’m trying to come back to my other languages at least a little bit.

With Spanish, I have purchased Mentirosa | L30?? and finished the first chapter! I posted in the book club thread but didn’t really have much to say so far.

With Arabic, I’d like to get back to it, but am not sure what that will exactly look like yet… I’m going to focus on Spanish, first, and maybe if I get back into a rhythm there, I’ll try adding Arabic back in, too.

4 Likes
43

I’ve now finished the week 2, week 3, and week 4 readings for Mentirosa! Week 7 just started, so I’m still three weeks behind, but I’m within striking distance of catching up.

Didn’t quite meet my goal of getting totally caught up last week, but I think if I just read slightly faster than the regular club pace, it shouldn’t take too long for me to get there.

6 Likes
44

I managed to get caught up on Mentirosa! Though since the club just rolled over to a new week, I haven’t read the latest chapter yet, haha. But I was caught up for a bit!

Here are my thoughts on the week 5, week 6, week 7, and week 8 readings.

I had a busy week last week, so didn’t really have time to do much more than read Mentirosa, but at least I’m keeping my head above water with that club.

4 Likes
45

Long time no update…

I kept up with Mentirosa, but that’s about all the studying I got done. Here are my thoughts on the readings for weeks 9-10, weeks 11-12, and then weeks 13-16 (the last of which technically hasn’t even started yet).

I finished the book! Right before the end of the year. I think there was about 30 minutes left of 2024 when I reached the last page… :sweat_smile:

I wanted to finish at least one book in Spanish in 2024, since my reading habit sort of fell off hard when I got super depressed midway through the year.

And so, with that, here is my lotería tabla again, updated for the first time since January:

766×944 102 KB

Really, there was only one card I could use to represent Mentirosa, hahaha. There were many botellas in this story, and it was the cause of both the initial inciting incident as well as a notable scene near the end…

I like the meaning that this website gives for the card. It’s very fitting for this book:

El significado de la botella se relaciona con tomar decisiones, nos recuerda que las personas tenemos el derecho a equivocarnos, pero también tenemos la obligación de recapacitar y componer el rumbo.

Se suele cantar como: “Como micrófono para borracho y como remedio para el enfermo".

La herramienta del borracho.

The tool of the drunk.

1292×2048 397 KB

5 Likes
46

Every year, on my Japanese study log, I do a yearly retrospective post where I talk about everything that I did over the year, and whether or not I met my goals.

I went back and forth on whether I wanted to do one for this log or not. On the one hand, there were some pretty significant language learning things, like this log coming into existence, for one thing (I just checked, and this is actually this thread’s one year anniversary to the day), not to mention me starting to learn a whole entire new language!

On the other hand, 2024 was an awful, terrible year that I will remember the rest of my life, and I didn’t feel like I had accomplished enough language stuff to bother reporting back on it.

I guess the side of me that feels compelled to log stuff won out in the end, though, because here I am, writing a belated 2024 retrospective post after all.

Reading/listening practice

Here is my very short list of accomplishments last year (see my Japanese study log post for Japanese stuff specifically).

Books finished in Spanish:

Books started in Spanish:

Podcasts listened to in Spanish:

  • Radio Ambulante (29 episodes)

Films watched in Spanish:

I didn’t get far enough with Palestinian Arabic to really read/listen to much media (except with English subtitles, which I did watch several films that way), so I have nothing to report back on there.

Instead of setting direct goals or anything like that, I’m going to do something a little different and write a reflection on each language, and some of the things that are on my mind as we head into 2025.

Palestinian Arabic

Well, my big update here is that I know anything at all about the language now! This section in my log wouldn’t have even existed prior to this year.

However, I’m not even A1 level yet in any skill, so I can’t claim that I know any more than just some of the very basics.

As part of my reflection, I wanted to link this article titled Huda Fakhreddine & Yasmeen Hanoosh: Translating Arabic & Gaza, where two Arabic-English translators talk about the translator’s burden and the inadequacy of language during a genocide.

The piece resonated with me for many reasons, but one of my takeaways from it was, “Man, I need to get back into learning Arabic.” I want to do away with needing the intermediary of English.

It made me think, too, about how I once ended up on the Arabic version of wikipedia late last year (I was looking up خشخاش poppies when looking for art references for my October drawing challenge), and it had a banner at the top of the page with a message about Palestine, which the English version of wikipedia did not have. What does it mean that this was separated by language? What did they feel so compelled to say in Arabic that they couldn’t say with the same voice in English?

So I want to learn Arabic. I don’t know exactly when or how or where, but I want to learn it.

The friend I was learning the language with previously (before we had to put our lessons on pause due to her moving out of the state) is also interested in getting back into it, so I think if we can make it work, we’ll try to resume our lessons with our instructor in the West Bank, but there’s still so much up in the air, it’s impossible to say when that will happen, or if that will be able to happen.

I do want to learn more, though. If I have any sort of goal for 2025, that’s it: I want to learn more Palestinian Arabic.

Spanish

I had hoped, with Natively adding Spanish at the very start of the year, that 2024 would be an extremely productive year for me with reading in Spanish. I started out with pretty good momentum! But life had other plans for me, and I had to let go of a lot of my language goals because I didn’t have the time/energy for it anymore.

So I did not, in fact, manage to read more in Spanish this year than the last.

2025 also isn’t looking too great in that regard, either, so I’m not going to set any concrete goals, but I do want to try to read (and watch/listen, hopefully) at least some amount of Spanish, at whatever energy level I’m able to manage. It’d be nice if I can finish the books I already have in progress, but I know myself, and I’m not going to enforce that.

My first Spanish read of the year is probably going to be Nos llamaron Enemigo (They Called Us Enemy Spanish Edition) | L22??, the Spanish translation of George Takei’s graphic novel, which the Spanish fiction book club here is likely going to be reading next.

Just yesterday, I was talking to a Japanese-American friend and a Mexican-American friend, and we were talking about the history of Japanese internment camps in the U.S., and about how the current extreme anti-immigrant political climate in the U.S. feels alarmingly similar to the political climate from that time.

So Nos llamaron enemigo feels unfortunately very timely in that regard…

I don’t know if I really have much to say, and I’m probably already pushing the bounds of a study log a bit, but I feel like languages are always connected to the circumstances and politics which surround you.

I get the sense that knowing Spanish might become even more important in these coming years.

So I am going to keep doing what I can do, and keep practicing, and I guess prepare for the worst world while hoping I never have to see it.

5 Likes
47

the arabic wikipedia page has had that banner on for years now in general (meaning it’s not something specific to the poppies entry)

all wikipedia enties are seperated by language, it’s either a wikipedia worker or some random person making entries in whatever specific language they know and that you later see in the options.
It’s also why some pages are available and some aren’t depending on the language.

edit:
btw for that same reason sometimes the wikipedia pages in English are VERY different than the ones I see in my native or in arabic for example

3 Likes
48

The banner that I was talking about is gone now (for me, at least), but that one specifically was new; I found discussion about it that dates it to December 23, 2023. Here’s more info (and a screenshot of the banner, though I think the one there was a little different than how it looked at the time I saw it).

It was up site-wide, so I found it on the poppies page, but it was displayed on every page you visited. But only on the Arabic language version of the site. There was no equivalent banner in English, Japanese, or Spanish wikipedia (those are the only ones I really visit generally).

That link above contains a link to the original discussion (in Arabic) that led to the implementation of that banner. Naturally, I can’t read it yet, haha, so I can’t tell you the nuance of the conversation, but you can peruse it for yourself to see what folks were saying.

It was just striking to me in this instance that they made that decision to put that banner up, seemingly with near universal approval among everyone who keeps the Arabic language wikipedia in operation, and meanwhile the conversations happening about it in English were a total trainwreck (and were mostly being done largely by people who don’t even understand Arabic, who were forming their opinions based on machine translation).

The first link I posted above also talks about issues with Arabic wikipedia relying too much on English sources. I actually encountered this issue a bit, too, when trying to help a friend translate a Japanese film director talking about Palestine, and I realized my usual tactic of switching to English language wikipedia articles to get ideas for how to translate Japanese words didn’t work with this because the English pages were all pretty biased in a way the original Japanese wasn’t…

It made me think about all the ways that English makes it hard to talk about subjects like this, and I feel like so many voices are missing from that conversation because very important parts of it are only happening in Arabic.

2 Likes
49

Tbh it’s true for any language since there’s different perspectives that you dont experience unless you’re familiar with a different culture and know the language. It’s not exactly just a positive thing, a more plural conversation is happening in English than in Arabic imo since English is made up of people who speak it as a second language and share those inside perspectives.

The reason why it’s so universal for the Arabic wikipedia is because in Arabic speaking communities in general there is a very high concensus on matters regarding Palestine with almost no place for criticism.

For example, they don’t make much distinction between an Israeli, a Zionist and a Jew and only recently did I start seeing people of the younger generation that speak English that started questioning that and pointing out that there’s a difference.

2 Likes
50

Well, in my country, at least, a lot of the English sources on the matter are highly propagandized and a lot of information is being actively suppressed (here’s a bias analysis of several major publications and some firsthand accounts from reporters), and the same is true in Canada and in the UK as well.

(And that’s before our new president started actively scrubbing information on public health and climate change and such, so I’m sure things are only going to get worse :upside_down_face:)

So it is currently very hard to get trustworthy information in English, especially in the country I live in, because it’s incredibly corrupt and there’s a lot of active censorship as well as propagation of false information.

I’m sure there’s plenty of propaganda in Arabic, too, but so much of what gets published in English has to fight through so many layers of imperialism and colonialism (the interview with the translators that I shared above talks a bit about this). I want to be able to hear people’s voices directly without having that barrier in between.

As someone who doesn’t speak Arabic well enough to have access to those communities, I don’t want to generalize them. So I can’t comment on this unless I want to be like those people on wikipedia arguing over machine translated versions of Arabic pages, haha.

I can say, though, that all the Arabic speakers I personally know very much do distinguish between those three things. Also, my country tries very hard to equate them in English, too, which is awful for all of my Jewish friends because it leads to more antisemitism if the actions of a country get tied to their Jewish identity. So we have to constantly work hard to show that there is a separation and a difference between them.

I just want to be able to hear from Palestinians directly rather than having their experiences always filtered through English, because I know that a lot of what I do hear simplifies or misrepresents them.

4 Likes
51

Spanish

The next Spanish book club started! I got myself a copy of Nos Llamaron Enemigo (in print this time, since there’s no instant lookup benefit to a graphic novel ebook anyway), and I’ve read the first 50 pages of it for the club. Talked about that some here.

Here are some extended thoughts that are more personal and which don't really relate specifically to that book:

Reading this story in Spanish hit me a lot harder than I was expecting it to. My own family is white and I’m not personally at risk of getting deported or sent to an internment camp or anything like that, but I live in a city with a very large population of immigrants, and I have many friends who are immigrants, some of whom have spent a big portion of their lives in California.

ICE raids have already started happening in my city, and people are getting detained even if they’re legal citizens. It’s a really scary time, and I’ve been trying to do what I personally can to help others.

I actually read this book right after I went to a protest. Maybe that’s part of why it hit so hard, because I can see this kind of stuff affecting the lives of people around me as we speak.

A few years ago, I read a local history book that actually got translated into Spanish (I read the Spanish version), and I learned a lot of really unsavory things about the city I live in…

I learned, for instance, that there were many Chinese immigrants living here before the city officially became a city, and in the late 1800s, the city literally drove out all the Chinese residents and passed a decree that wouldn’t permit Chinese people to live within city limits.

Some other cities, like Seattle and Olympia in Washington, actually managed to prevent these efforts from happening in their own cities, because local citizens would come out on the streets to protect Chinese residents from the mobs. But that didn’t happen in the city where I live, so ultimately Chinese people were forced out.

Then Japanese immigrants started settling in the city at the end of the 1800s and beginning of the 1900s, and the white people of course had a very racist reaction and ruled that they would “discourage” Japanese immigrants from settling here. This was decades before WWII.

As you can imagine, things only got worse after Pearl Harbor, and Japanese people living in the city that I live in now were rounded up and sent to internment camps. Most of them never returned to live here.

Starting in the early 20’s, Filipino people moved here, too, but racist white mobs physically threatened them repeatedly, and most of the Filipinos who lived here ended up leaving in the years that followed. It was driven by the same racist garbage you see today directed against other groups of immigrants, like a fear that Filipinos were stealing white people’s jobs.

As a result of all of this, the population of Asian people in this city has never made up more than 1 percent of the population.

It’s really hard not to see echos of this in the current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, which in the present day is directed largely at Mexican immigrants in the community as opposed to Chinese, Japanese, or Filipino people, but it’s the exact same garbage, and the racist white people are using the exact same tactics.

Personally, I’m determined not to let history repeat itself.

I want to study more ways that communities in America resisted these racist attempts to drive immigrants out, as well as ways that white individuals were able to help Japanese people, like the family described in this article that nopenopenope linked in the club thread.

Arabic

Don’t really have much of an update regarding language learning, but I found out that the Educational Bookshop in Jerusalem got raided by police and the owners were arrested and a whole bunch of books got confiscated.

I’m mentioning this here because the only book I own in Arabic actually came from there! A friend got me a copy of it last year through a Jewish Voice for Peace connection. Someone was able to visit the store and bring back a bunch of books for the rest of us, so I was able to get a copy of Spring Is Here: Embroidered Flowers of the Palestinian Spring, which is a very difficult book to find if you live overseas.

I had an ebook copy of it, but since it’s an image-heavy parallel text book in English and in Arabic, the ebook format isn’t very good for that kind of thing, so I really wanted a print copy. The Educational Bookshop didn’t have it listed in their online catalog, but when we asked about it, they were able to somehow find me a copy, which is really kind of them.

So please support the Educational Bookshop if you can! There is a fundraiser for them here to help them recoup some of the costs.

I actually learned the word خشخاش from this book:

1920×1317 270 KB

5 Likes