tonight was the first night with my new arabic tutor. i know i've babbled about arabic here, but i can't remember what i wrote (nor do i feel like reading through my archives), so forgive me if i repeat myself. with the spring 2004 semester ending, i have topped out penn's offerings in the arabic language in the evening. i made an effort to lobby for them to create a new evening 3rd year class (or, at least, move their daytime 3rd year class to the evenings), but it didn't work. so now we're on plan B, a private tutor.
i have been avoiding a private tutor so far because of the cost. when i first started my efforts to learn this language in chicago 5 years ago, i looked into it and found it was too expensive. this time, however, i was going in on a tutor with other classmates and we could bring the cost down. though several seemed interested when the class was going on, so far, only one was willing to follow with it. which is surprising since at our level our arabic is not worth very much and yet we are so close to a tipping point into greater understanding we can all taste it. or at least i can. it tastes like dajaaj
anyway, we met the tutor tonight and i think it went well. we're basically following our old text book to give some structure, but the tutor promises to bring in news articles from al-jazeera to give us a more useful set of vocabulary in today's world of arabic broadcasts (words like "weapons of mass destruction" and "artillery" simply were not covered in our text). it's an odd thing to have a tutor, i've never had one before. he's both our professor and our employee. it's never completely clear who is supposed to direct who. but he seems flexible and willing to go wherever we want to go and i need other people to keep me disciplined enough to keep working at this language. i am tentatively planning to go to syria in 2005. hopefully by then i will be fully conversational.
