Hey folks. Chops, AKA the Crypto King, invited me to be a contributor to his blog for his Year of Ten Thousand Reps. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to gauge repetitions for myself, but the important thing to me is having the accountability to actually study Arabic on a regular basis. I've been working on it, off and on (mostly off, but with a little bit of consistency) since June of '05. I figure that if I make copious use of homemade flash cards (a technique I picked up from an uncomfortably authoritarian German instructor in college that actually seems to work well), and combine that with a handful of Arabic literature sources and my Arabic textbook and accompanying CDs, I can probably make a lot of progress in 2009. As I mentioned, the accountability is the big thing.
So, uh... I guess now would be a decent point to list off some of the tools and sources I'll be using for my "10,000 Reps" during the coming year.
Ahlen wa Sahlen by Mahdi Alosh (book and CDs; if I actually satisfactorily complete these, I may move on to the intermediate version)
the BBC Arabic service, and podcasts from BBC Xtra and ArabicPod.net podcasts
literature available in Arabic and English, such as The Bible, the Quran, and just because it's available and hilarious, The Green Book by Muammar Qaddhafi, plus any other combination Arabic-English literature I can get my hands on
I suppose that right now's as good a time as any to go to work on this, so I'm going to get a few things ready for bed, and then shut down the computer, sit in a different chair, and study my flash cards for a while before racking out. With accountability from the Crypto King and others, I hope to stay on track with this and really develop my knowledge of the language before 2010 comes around. So... Uh... Here we go?
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