Author: afreema2

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Learning to Learn a Language

One of the most valuable lessons I will take away from this summer is the mechanics and process of learning a language (particularly a language as difficult as Arabic). As I look forward to life after my language program, I am beginning to think about how to continue my Arabic education through a combination of tutors and self-study. This is something I’ve tried to do in the past, and have often felt lost and a bit aimless. 

First, what I learned this summer that I am eager to build on down the line: 

  • A much clearer understanding of grammar
    • No, grammar is not my favorite (in English or in any other language), but I have developed a much more structured understanding of Arabic grammar and how to operationalize it. This foundational knowledge allows me to see a path towards deeper understand of more complex engagement with Arabic and the patterns that will increase the speed at which I am able to learn Arabic.
      • A note on grammar: after years of hard work, I pride myself as a pretty good writer and editor. Having said that, I know so very little about English language grammar, and this fact definitely showed through during the summer (what, for example, are process verbs versus action verbs???). Is I had to learn the fundamentals of English grammar to understand Arabic grammar, I often wondered how I can be a good writer with such a weak understanding of English grammar. The answer, I believe, actually calls back to an idiom in Arab culture. When you are cooking traditional dishes, you have to FEEL the measurements and the flavors. This is how I think about writing in English. I might not know the name of the structures, but I can feel what allows for clear and readable content. 
    • I also developed a pretty clear understanding of where my gaps in knowledge are in grammar, and these will be top priorities as I look forward
      • Conjugations of the 10 forms
      • How different forms of speech relate to the ten forms
      • Negation
  • A better understanding of the commitment required to learn large amounts of vocab.
    • This summer, I learned 1,000 words from my Arabic textbooks alone (yes – textbooks, I will be traveling home with four different Arabic textbooks, in addition to my ginormous dictionary). But really *knowing* this vocabulary required endless AnkiApp reviews, slowly working my way to 90% + success, and then an eventual insistence of getting all of the worlds correct. Really knowing the words and being able to recall them a week, two weeks, four weeks later required significantly more review than I had ever understood before. 
    • With this knowledge, building regular vocab review into my daily life will be an essential to continuing to develop Arabic.
  • Learning languages takes time. You can rush getting in the hours, but you can’t shorten the hours that it takes to learn the language. This summer, I did over 450 hours of Arabic. According to the State Department, it takes 2,200 hours to learn Arabic to a working proficiency. I made a big dent in this (and already had about 400-500 hours going into the summer), but it also requires patience and steady commitment, even beyond the intensity of a summer program.
    • With this, I plan to work in a bit of language study every day to make steady progress. If I did ten hours a week this year (perhaps optimistic, but useful for framing), I could reach over 1,500 hours of Arabic on my path to 2,200, and see steady progress with steady commitment. 
  • Textbooks and structured learning are actually really helpful
    • My Arabic studies over the past several years have been unstructured and ad hoc. While there are significant benefits to this, I also really appreciated the structure of a textbook in guiding Arabic language learning. While I’m not necessarily the biggest fan of al-Kitaab, the infamous and nearly universally used Arabic textbook, I did see the benefit of having a structured and standardized system of learning a language. With this knowledge, I plan to continue working through Qasid’s textbook and then transition to a media textbook to see tangible progress through a system. 
  • Ask for help
    • Arabic is super tough and I imagine it would be almost impossible to learn the language without a native speaker guiding you through the process. This summer I leaned heavily on so many in my native Arabic language community, and I’m so grateful for their support.
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Global Community

I’ve been thinking a lot about my global community while I’ve been in Amman. I’ve relied on people from all over the world for help that has been essential for my functioning in Amman and in this language program. The language program is tough, and I’ve honestly been struggling during my time here – struggling with my coursework, my health, struggling with a seemingly endless saga with my water cooler, and struggling with how to live everyday in Amman – in which I am divorced from so many of the things that are essential to ground myself. 

And yet, my global community is what has helped me get through the day-to-day this summer and has prompted a lot of reflection for me. 

  1. The international community at Qasid: people come from all over the world to study at Qasid. While most of the people in my class are from the US (minus one Turkish man who joined our class a few weeks in), it’s still pretty international. Three of us are from India, one of my colleagues is from India, and the other is from Pakistan. But perhaps more notable is the community I surround myself with outside of classes. My closest friends here are a woman from Greece, from Italy, and from Hong Kong. Last night while out to dinner at an absolutely gorgeous restaurant, I couldn’t help but ponder the ways in which being foreigners – and also being PhD students, and also women, and also students who are really struggling in our language classes – has united us, despite the fact that we ourselves are from such different backgrounds. This is not to say that our own cultural identities are erased in the process – far from it – but rather points to the intersectionality of our identities. These girls are my rocks in this crazy summer, and I feel a sense of grounding when I am with them, even though they are as “foreign” to me as any of my Jordanian teachers or non-American classmates. 
  2. My platonic soul mate: my best friend is a Syrian woman that I have never met in person. Our lives aligned in a brief moment, we met, and we have been fast friends ever since. We study similar topics, have similar passions surrounding women’s empowerment, and share similar political outlooks. She is in Lebanon now, but just knowing she is in the same time zone is in and of itself comforting to me, when I am so far away from home. Not only this, but she is genuinely invested in supporting me as I try to learn her native language. Here are a collection of texts from the past few weeks:
    • “How do you say ‘you got this’ in Arabic?” (there’s no equivalent) 
    • “How would you say ‘I’ve realized new sides of my dog’ in Arabic?” 
    • Do you have any favorite Shami terms? (Shami is the Levantine dialect). Her response is that her favorite one is “bury me,” which is supposedly a term that indicates a profession of love (still thinking through the logic on that one). 
    • “I don’t know case endings please send help” (she sent help in the sense that she also could not remember how to do case endings, which was incredibly comforting as I struggled to learn them myself). 

My point, here, is that despite the fact that we have never met, and despite living worlds away both figuratively and (most of the time) literally, we have also found so many means of connection, as well as ways of supporting each other as we journey through both life and academia. 

  1. My Syrian community: For the past several years, I have worked extensively in service on the Syrian community. First, through Syrian Youth Empowerment (SYE), where I helped hundreds of Syrian students apply to college and then through DAWNetwork, my own mentorship program for Syrian girls. This summer, this community has shown up for me over, and over, and over again. In the first weeks I was here, I posted on Instagram asking if any of my native Arabic friends could do me a favor (recording my vocab list so I could practice pronunciation). I got over 50 responses from people who were willing to help. A couple of weeks later, I again posted on Instagram asking a question about visas for Syrians to come to the US. Once again, my inbox was filled with responses. And just today, I messaged a wonderful student of mine from a few years ago who is starting up an Arabic tutoring program. I was curious what her prices were as I think it might be a great supplement to my solo studies once I’m back on campus in South Bend. She responded “So regarding your question, I am happy that a day when I can help you has come haha, so I am happy to take this voluntarily. This is honestly from the bottom of my heart and I feel so happy that you are considering taking sessions with me.” For me, this is not about the money, and it certainly isn’t something I deserve. For me, it is a manifestation of one of my guiding principles – that I will be changed in my volunteer work as much as I will support others. Today, I know that I have a true community that values relationships over what can be given and taken, and I am eternally grateful. 

Somewhat unfortunately, I feel like the biggest gap in my “global community” is a connection with local communities in Jordan. When I’ve done study abroad programs in the past, they have often been made up of half local people and half international students. I am only just realizing the true extent of the benefit of this model. Obviously, there is no clear way of having a model like that in a language program, but I have still felt that it has been difficult to connect with local Jordanians in sustained ways. This, both during this trip and in the future, is my next challenge. 

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The Woes of 3B

During a Qasid orientation session, they discussed the characteristics of the different levels of Arabic learning. They addressed the awe of level 1: the awe of seeing an “I” (alif) on page 1 and a (bah) on page 2. The awe of the new language carries you through level 1 and 2, so they said, with confidence that you will someday be fluent. Then, you come to level 3. This is where motivation slows down, and you start to lose your focus. Learning seems to plateau, and progress isn’t as clear. By levels 4 and 5, however, you see an upward swing again. You start to see how your work to learn Arabic will allow you to realize the goals that you set out to fulfill in deciding to learn Arabic. Sounds pretty great, right? Well, don’t get too excited ‘cause, you guessed it, I’m in level 3. 

The director of Qasid, who himself learned Arabic starting as a teenager, described the experience of level 3, with anecdotes that spoke directly to my soul: “All I know how to say in Arabic is “my father is an engineer” even though my father ISN’T an engineer” and “I only know how to say that I’m lonely in Arabic but I actually have a great social life and support system.” 

Learning a language is hard, and Arabic is one of the harder languages to learn. The US Foreign Service Institute estimates that it takes 2,200 hours to learn Arabic. As a comparison, they estimate that it takes about 600-750 hours to learn Spanish and 1,100 hours to learn Hebrew. To look at it another way, when talking to a Syrian friend about my continuing aspirations of learning Arabic several months ago, he responded that he didn’t know how anybody learned Arabic when there are 50 words for camel alone. 

My Arabic trajectory has also been somewhat unique. I did four years of Arabic in high school, three quarters at UChicago, some sporadic tutoring sessions while working at SYE, and then intensive tutoring last summer. I did about an hour a day for my first semester at the University of Notre Dame, and then about 6 hours total the following semester. 

ما شاء الله 

I have been placed into level 3b. From the beginning, everything about that level felt scary and the imposter syndrome has been strong. Level 3, really? I had hoped that I might be placed into the level that works with the second al-Kitaab book, but now that I’ve done it, it’s scary. What if the placement interviewer got me confused with somebody else? I don’t think the interview misrepresented my skills, but what if it did? In discussing the placements, Qasid has generally indicated that while they are open to a conversation about placement, they are also pretty confident in the ability of their staff to place us at the right levels, and when push comes to shove, the Qasid instructors get the final say. When I brought up my hesitation with my professor a week in, she said that I was fine, but that if the course was too overwhelming for me, that I could switch. 

Part of the issue, though, is that my education has been so atypical. I’m realizing how much I don’t know from al-Kitaab 1 and the first few chapters of al-Kitaab 2 — even though I’ve technically worked through them before. This summer has been incredibly beneficial in standardizing my education and filling in a lot of cracks (particularly with grammar!) so that I have a much stronger foundation. I also believe that this knowledge will be beneficial moving forward as I continue to learn Arabic on my own and with the support of the Syrian community that I have supported for so long. I am hopeful that this is a foundation – an essential foundation – to bring my Arabic skills to new levels.   

ان شاء الله

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No More Excuses

June 7, 2023

I have finally reached the point where I don’t have the excuse of “something in the way” to avoid engaging with the idea of spending over two months in Jordan. Really since I received the email that I received funding from SLA, I’ve felt that I would grapple with my trip once I made it through the other big things I’ve had to do over the past several months. First, it was my first year conference paper for the History department, then it was finals, then the first year conference paper presentation, then the finals that I finished with time from incompletes, and then a ginormous complicated move from one house to another (the fact that it was only five minutes did not change the amount of work of the move). Once the move was finally survived, I had to make it through the road trip to Boston to get my dog to his dog sitter. 

But now, I’m in a week of decompression before I leave for Jordan late on Saturday night, and I don’t have any excuses anymore. 

I traveled a lot in my early 20s. I have spent multiple months in Ghana and Rwanda. I traveled significantly in sub-Saharan Africa for a job in my early 20s, and I did my Master’s degree in Amsterdam, which of course came with significant travel across Jordan and even a conference in Amman. I’m no stranger to the anticipation of international travel, but I haven’t traveled at all since the start of Covid-19 in 2020, and my life became very small in the process. In fact, despite living in the world’s largest cities for my whole life (Amsterdam, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, DC, Chicago, and New York), the move to South Bend hasn’t felt that difficult. After two years of social distancing during Covid, it ultimately felt like I could just as easily stare at four walls in South Bend as anywhere else in the world. While I’m grateful that the threat of Covid-19 has largely decreased over time, it also means that my life must begin to expand again. Of course, my first year in a PhD program went a long way in forcing that expansion – in some really wonderful ways and in some overwhelming ways – there are still many more activities that were largely the norm in my life before Covid that I haven’t yet engaged with in a world where we are living with Covid. 

So, I come to this trip to Jordan with a bit of apprehension, despite having extensive experience with international travel. This apprehension means that it’s difficult for me to imagine what my life will look like in Jordan. I’ve traveled to Jordan briefly and have extensive exposure to Middle Eastern culture through previous work with Syrian, Palestinian, and Iraqi students. Even so, it’s still hard to imagine exactly what the day-to-day will look like, what aspects of Jordanian culture feel familiar and which feel difficult, and how my own mix of cultures will interact with local cultures. 

No matter what it might look like, I hope to be changed by my summer in Jordan. Of course, I plan to have a much deeper knowledge of Arabic by the end of the summer, and I hope to have developed new strategies to continue learning Arabic after my summer in Amman. I hope to gain additional insights into the direction of my dissertation project. But I also hope to be changed in more abstract ways. I hope to learn from and be influenced by the communities I encounter in Jordan and to have my own Western views challenged and nuanced. I don’t know what this will look like – and honestly knowing what this might look like somewhat misses the point. I can’t wait to see what comes next.