Partial Credit?
Since the creation of it, the group chat has been a nice place to be miserable with my peers. We crack jokes, ask questions, and send memes both outside and during class. (And professor, if you’re reading this, no, we don’t.)
Wednesday night, I was able to talk to a friend back from home in Arabic and get some tips and advice on vocab and pronunciation. I really need to find someone here on campus who speaks the Levantine dialectic. While I know I could set up an appointment with my professor, professors can be very intimidating. And even though I know it’s okay to make mistakes as I am only five weeks into learning this beautiful but difficult language, I want to be perfect already. Which is a feeling inside of me that I need to get rid of. The wanting of perfection never does anyone any good.
Tuesday, September 22
We had our first quiz on Tuesday. It included dictation, letter connection, and translating. The dictation part went okay. My professor said two words in Arabic, and we had to write them down. The letter connection involves taking the individual forms of Arabic letters and correctly writing them to form a word. Here’s an example: ح + ج + ا + ب = حجاب. Reading right to left, the first three letters connect, but since the alif [ا] does not connect to any letter that follows it, the baa [ب] is written in its independent form.
The last section was translation, and I know I am going to be in trouble for any future quizzes and exams I take. We were given Arabic phrases and sentences, but my professor also read aloud what was written. I couldn’t read anything, but I got most of the translation since she read it out loud.
Overall, I enjoy writing in Arabic the most, even if I don’t know exactly when I’m writing (hopefully none of the words are swear words!). I struggle with reading and speaking in Arabic a lot. I still haven’t sat down and poured over my vocab as much as I want to. I have forgotten how much of a self disciple learning a language is.
After we finished and submitted the quiz, we immediately went over it. I didn’t do as well as I had hoped. I think I may have gotten a 70–75%, which isn’t horrible for my first Arabic quiz. I didn’t do as well in the letter connection section as I thought I would.
Here’s a funny conversation that took place as we were reviewing the quiz
Student: “Can we get partial credit?”
Professor: “Partial credit for what? Knowing you got something wrong?”
Oh, and my professor showed us her cat. He was a cutie.
Thursday, September 24
We went over several drills in the textbook: dictation, letter connection, and learning the difference between similar-sounding letters. We watched some videos of people introducing themselves to one another and then dissected the interactions. Lastly, we were put into breakout rooms to create an introduction scenario.
As I’m typing this, I just realized that my professor didn’t assign us any homework… guess I’ll be studying vocab this weekend. Or, at the very least, creating the flashcards for the latest chapter.
Arabic Word of the Week
question / su’aal / سوال