First day of class

I placed in Level 4 (out of 5)!  I am so pumped—it has been an entire year if I remember correctly since I have taken a formal Arabic class.  When I was in Morocco on scholarship last summer, I cracked open the second volume of Georgetown University’s Al-Kitaab series for the first time and it was awesome digging into the grammar covered in that book.  AND this means that we will actually finish Al-Kitaab 2 and start the last book in the Al-Kitaab series starting in July. How cool is that?! I’ll be an advanced speaker by the time I leave here.  However, I remember that in Morocco I was quite overwhelmed because the amount of speaking was extremely intense in class, so that might be what I’m in for again here.  Fortunately, when I returned to school after that study abroad, my Arabic professor noticed that I could more comfortably speak the language, so maybe I’ll be alright.  We’ll see… 

So far, Arabic class here is good.  I like the professor, I like the people, and I like the subject; that should carry me a long way.  But three hours every day of it is definitely a lot to take in.  Omani Arabic class should be okay, too, I think, because the professor is very engaged and had us performing skits today as if we were truly guests drinking coffee at a friend’s house.  My prof looks like an Arab version of one of my guy friends back at school, though, so that’s a little distracting.  Anyways, hopefully I’ll get to try out the new Omani dialect vocabulary sooner rather than later!  Unfortunately, I have found myself quite busy with homework already as we’re cruising through chapters 6 and 7 of the textbook this week.  Things should slow down next week, so hopefully I’ll be able to spend some time talking to the Omani women who ring our doorbells (or, in some cases, just barge right in to our apartment), other than to tell them in Arabic that, sorry, I can’t hang out tonight because I have too much homework!

I was hoping to get some of it out of the way with my language partner meetings, but that’s not the way it worked out.  I ended up getting placed with the only guy in the language partner group, so this will be a good chance for me to freely talk to an Omani male without any “issues” arising.  And with all of the Omani women back at our apartment, I don’t think it will be too much trouble to strike up some female friendships.  My partner, Mohammed, is a student studying electrical engineering here at the University of Nizwa and he is rather shy but very nice.  Coming into this program, I expected that our language partner time was going to be 1-on-1 but that’s not the way it turned out to be.  So I am in a group with my friends Alice and Ross, who are both awesome at Arabic!  Today I found that I didn’t say anything, but hopefully as vocabulary starts coming back to me, I’ll speak up next time.  As it has pretty much been an entire year since I have spoken/read Arabic on a regular basis, I’m a little rusty.  Once I get the hang of it again, however, I know I’m going to advance so far.  How could I not, with fitting in an entire year’s worth of language learning into two months?  :)