A Quiz on Election Day

Sunday, November 1 & Monday, November 2

When I say that I studied for this quiz, I studied for this quiz. I finally ditched the virtual flashcards (for now) and made physical flashcards: a mountain of flashcards. Since I don’t know how to write the entire alphabet yet, I had to copy and paste the words from an online textbook companion and make flashcards that way. Once I printed them out, I cut and folded and taped them together. Overall, I think it took me six or seven hours to make 135 flashcards. (I really should have started on them at the beginning of the semester, oops!)

Here’s a picture of all the flashcards I made:

I did most of this work on Sunday and Monday in preparation for Tuesday. I also made flashcards of the letters I have learned so far, with the name of the letter, its different forms, and the sound it makes. On top of reviewing my letters and vocabulary, I also had to reteach myself how to conjugate a verb. We’ve only learned five forms so far, but there’s a lot of different parts to keep track of. 

While I was studying, I finally listened to one of the playlists I saved on Spotify. Some of the songs are really good, and I created my own playlist titled “1001 Arabian Songs.” If you use Spotify and want to follow it, here is the link!

(Oh, and we never were able to get a study group set up. Maybe next time.)

Tuesday, November 3

Tensions are always high during an election day, so it felt weird taking a quiz on Tuesday. But graciously, my professor allowed us to leave after we finished the quiz and emailed it to her. There were four sections: dictation, letter connection, adjectives and nouns, and matching translations. I feel really good about the letter connection and matching part, but I know I completely bombed the adjectives part, and I think I got half of the dictation section correct. Overall, for the amount of time that I studied, I feel that I did a fairly good job. Which, for this week, I’ll take that as a win. 

Thursday, November 5

We went over Tuesday’s quiz on Thursday, and surprisingly, I did really well. If my professor grades the quiz how I marked it, I got 17/22 correct. She hasn’t pulled me aside to tell me that I need to do better, so I think I’m doing fairly well in the class overall. 

After we reviewed the quiz, the teacher’s assistant introduced us to the next four letters we will be learning: ف [faa], ق [qaaf], ك [kaaf], and ل [laam]. The presentation was great, but it was entirely in Arabic, so I felt like I could barely keep up. However, I know my professor didn’t expect us to follow everything that he was saying. The presentation was more for the TA than for us students. 

When the TA was finished presenting, my professor showed us how to write the different positions of the letters, and then went over what to do when an alif comes after a laam. In other words: ا [alif} + ل [laam] = لا. We did a couple of drills and then ended class five minutes early, which was nice.

On another note, on Wednesday I downloaded Duolingo and started their Arabic course. I hope that it will help reinforce what I’ve learned so far and motivate me to study more. Only time will tell!

Arabic Word of the Week

water / maa’ / ماء