Somehow I envisioned depicting my mental image of Arabic as something scarier than a teenage mutant couch potato bunny that’s been stock-piling Ben & Jerry’s in his gut for the last decade. Hopefully the red eyes at least do something.
Actually Arabic is not all that hard. Language classes tend to push students really hard because class spots can be limited and because programs want to keep their funding (re: SUNY). But when you take away some of the pressure from above, Arabic isn't so terribly much more difficult than anything else. But that's an entirely different discussion that will require a lot more citations and anecdotes before I feel comfortable making my case.
This summer I've extended my already 8 years of schooling to be a teaching assistant and sometimes instructor (I dare not use the term part-time, adjunct or anything else. I'm a lowly TA that gets to teach 3ish days a week). Somehow my 200+ credit hours for my BA in Linguistics and French (including a side trip through electronics, astronomy and fencing) plus MA in Arabic did not satiate my lust for being in an academic environment. After 3 hours a morning of core classes, plus homework/grading, plus 3 hours a week of a conversation course (times two sections for me), a listening hour (like a lab), an Arabic film, an Arabic lecture and some kind of cultural activity each week—after all that, I’m officially satiated.
You might think that cramming everything we do into 1 semester is difficult, but for ASI we’ve crammed it into 1 single month. Impressively, the students have largely risen to the occasion and can speak, read and write in Arabic—at a basic level. They could tell you were to go in Arabic. Literally.
The real problem that I discovered in all of this is that I am the instructor, not the student. Every day I walk past the Chinese intensive class and the Farsi intensive class as I go to work TAing and instructing. They all get to learn a new language in 1 month. Not me.
I've been dreaming of learning Chinese since 2005 when I started Arabic. I signed up for Swahili around 2007/2008 but had to drop the class before it started so I could take a required class that was only taught at that time. And since 2008 I've been dreaming of learning Russian. The only reason I didn't pursue it was that I decided that love of life and the outdoors should be as important to me as driving myself upward in academia—nigh-sacrilege at the time! Trisha and I even took an ASL class while we were dating, a recap of the month of ASL I audited in college. I haven't stopped wanting to learn any of these new-to-me languages. On the contrary, I've been asking around to see what good resources there are for me to use on my own.
I kind of wish I could be like this guy: Alexander Arguelles. He reads some dozens of languages. Well. I'm not sure about his speaking, since speaking can't be completely picked up from reading. But still, I get jealous hearing about him and many others who have the time and the opportunity to learn more languages.
I'm not sure it's just the ability to communicate with others that fascinates me. I'm not the most talkative person unless you catch me in an uncharacteristic mood. What I do like is the mathy part of language learning, building and manipulating those syntactic, morphological and phonological formulae that are so clear for the first couple years of study. It's like a puzzle!
But I also like being able to understand other people. When folks are in line behind or ahead of me at the grocery store speaking in another language I get elated when I can eavesdrop on them. It's even more fun when they're saying stuff they don't want other people to understand. It’s amazing how many private conversations are held at an uncomfortably loud level while the people speaking assume nobody else speaks their language. My favorite is when people do this in Spanish, as if no one in America speaks Spanish!!
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