Baby Steps

I'm trying not to burn out again, so I'm approaching my return to the Ten Thousand Reps challenge (or whatever we've bastardized it to for my special situation) as a sort of "baby steps" engagement to ease me back into the routine. It's helped by some productivity on Saturday - not relating to this, but I was really productive with some errands I'd needed to run for a while, so I'm trying to maintain the productivity in other areas, such as my Arabic studies. Special thanks go out to the man, Chops, for continually belittling me in order to get me moving again.

So, anyway, the last couple of days I've been pretty successful about listening to the Quran. I personally think that the Quran is remarkably difficult to follow because it tends to jump from topic to topic without any sort of transition or connection, but I'm fortunate to have found a source in which the Quran is recited by a qari in Arabic, and then by another qari in English. Even if the Quran is difficult, Chops has encouraged me to listen as frequently as possible to any Arabic audio that I can find, and I figure it can only help. I'm pretty good at picking up words I know as I listen, though I'm not sure how good I am at picking up words that I'm not yet familiar with. Once or twice a week, I listen to podcasts of BBC Xtra, the BBC's Arabic programming, against my better judgment. (As I just showed Chops, one of their current offerings is on "Arafat's poisoning" - it's good to know that the BBC is now endorsing asinine Palestinian conspiracy theories.) I also listen to Radio Sawa and the BBC Arabic service on occasion, but it's tough to listen to for a long time because I eventually just start to zone it out - and in the case of Radio Sawa (an Arabic language radio station that's broadcast throughout the Middle East and funded by the US federal government), about half of their programming is intolerable American R&B music.

Just to show that I have been learning something over the past few months, "qari/قارئ" is Arabic for "reciter", and is used to denote one who has memorized and recites the Quran/القرآن‎. Note the similarity of the words. That's because "Quran" actually means "recitation", and thus the word changes from "The Recitation" (al Quran) to "one who recites" (qari). Part of what makes Arabic so challenging (and simultaneously rewarding) are these similarities, which are of course similar to other languages that modify one word to change its meaning. The interesting thing about Arabic is that most words are based on a three letter root, with different accents or letters interspersed and combined with prefixes or suffixes to change the meaning. I was actually the first person to figure that whole thing out in my Arabic class in college, but figuring that out doesn't do much to help you when the bottom line is memorizing miniscule differences between one word and another that's nearly identical.

So, anyway, I think I posted about my flash cards yesterday morning. I wanted to do fifty yesterday morning, and instead I did thirty. I came back from work yesterday afternoon and did another seventy, for a total of one hundred yesterday. This evening I reviewed the remaining flash cards, about one hundred twenty of them, searching for repeated words, flash cards that I accidentally left incomplete in one way or another, and any other cards that just needed fixing or replacing. I found something on the order of a dozen, two or three of which were quick fixes (a dot or two here or there). I ripped three or four of them so that I can completely replace them, one of which had a repeat of the Shahada (الشهادة); there are another two or three that just need to have the translation or pronunciation added or fixed on the back.

I have two goals at this point, which I intend to do in sequence, rather than trying to start them simultaneously. My first goal is to complete my flash cards. So far, I have all of Wikipedia's List of Christian terms in Arabic on flash cards, and some of Wikipedia's Glossary of Islamic terms in Arabic on flash cards. I want to finish the Islamic terms (which is several more pages of stuff), and a few other words that I've picked up here or there. Then, I want to go through the first chapter of my textbook, Ahlen wa Sahlan, and put the relevant vocabulary from the first couple of chapters on flash cards. I'll omit things like the letters of the alphabet, or the little non-words that they use to help you put letters together, but there are a handful of words in those first few chapters that should be on my flash cards.

Once I'm caught up on making flash cards - which will be no small feat - I want to get myself into a regimen of about fifty flash cards per day, twice a day, and two or three lessons per week out of the book. There's a set of CDs that I bought with the book, and each CD (there are ten) has three or four lessons on it that follow along with the lessons in the book. I think that the book has a total of about twenty lessons, of which I did ten when I was in the class, but have only reviewed the first couple of lessons once or twice in the (almost) four intervening years. If I can spend the rest of 2009 doing a lesson or two per week, studying flash cards on a daily or near-daily basis, and adding new words and phrases as I go, I think I'll be in pretty good shape come 2010. Not fluent by any means, but in very good shape nonetheless.

But, as I said at the beginning of the post: baby steps. That's why all I did today was scan and scour through one hundred twenty flash cards as the second step in the process of fixing and updating them. This is actually a personal growth experience for me, too, because I usually prefer to work on a project all at once. Now that I'm an adult with real responsibilities and a highly structured schedule, I'm learning that I can't do most projects all at once, and have to work on them one step at a time. This is one of those projects, so it's a learning experience for me to have to do this bit by bit. So, that's my lengthy update, and I promise that the next one will be a little bit shorter.