Observant reader (hi, Mum!) may have noticed the lack of learning diary for the past two weeks. Mostly, the lapse was because I’ve just been too busy. In week 10 it was both my wife and my daughter’s birthdays; I’ve recently been trying to finalise a journal article; I’ve been doing remote work for a semester one unit at University of Canberra; and things have started to ramp up again for this year’s AMEJE activities. Even without all of that going on, Arabic classes and study and trying to be a good dad and husband leaves me with very little spare time to start with, and with all of that piled on top I had no choice but to jettison the learning diary for a couple of weeks. Sorry, Mum.

In terms of Arabic, the past fortnight was a rollercoaster ride. Week 10, I think, was the low point of the course so far. My confidence completely collapsed and I was consumed with a feeling that this whole exercise is futile. I couldn’t seem to make any headway with vocab, I was coming up against all sorts of brick walls in class, and the loss of confidence was disastrous for my speaking attempts out in the Real World. I guess this had to happen at some point, and I doubt it will be the last slump, but it was pretty unpleasant nonetheless.

At the end of the week on Thursday afternoon I had a long chat with Penina about how I was feeling and getting it all out in the open helped me identify exactly what was going on. One of the main drivers, I think, has been my shift to private classes which means I no longer have any point of reference in class for my progress other than my teacher. Previously, in group classes, I could bounce of my classmate and we would do an informal debrief after every lesson. Constant, low-level reinforcement like that made a lot of difference and I’m really missing that in my private class. So, a bit of an attitude adjustment was going to be necessary on my part, but I also resolved to raise the need for more feedback with my teacher.

I spent the weekend hammering my new vocab so I could hit the ground running on Sunday morning and it worked. My mid-month test was supposed to be at the end of the previous week but had been delayed until Sunday because my teacher had been unwell for a day. When I got the results back on Monday I was surprised to have done so well. And then I cleaned up on the vocab quiz as well which always sets me up, confidence wise, for the rest of the lesson.

While discussing the test results I took the opportunity to point out to my teacher that it may take me a while to pick up new vocab but vocab from the previous two months is cementing really nicely. I do 300-400 flashcards each day and my retention of the older words is excellent. I felt like I really needed to point that out and — yes — get some recognition for what I am doing along with feedback on what I need to do better. My teacher was great — took it on board and gave me some encouragement by talking about how we’ve broken the back of grammar over the past two months how the focus now needs to be on vocab building, and she laid out a bit of a roadmap of where we’ll go from here. This was just what I wanted to hear: signposts of progress and achievement.

And then the rest of week 11, in contrast to week 10, was great! Everything started flowing nicely for me, I had fun playing with written and spoken language, my flashcard stat graphs starting pointing in the right direction, and I found myself looking forward to class in the morning again unlike the previous week when I was dreading it. In lessons we started focusing on listening far more than we have previously and it is still a big weakness for me. I spent a lot of my study time listening to recordings with the accompanying transcripts but something I’m noticing far more now than I ever used to at home where I’m not surrounded by Arabic speakers is how *weird* fusha (Modern Standard Arabic) sounds — it’s nothing like the Arabic you hear on the street. My ears have become tuned to the sounds of people speaking aamiya (colloquial) and when I hear all the case markings being pronounced in my study recordings it’s almost like a different language.

Anyway, I promise to lift my diary game again from this week. In the meantime, stats!

Sunday

Late start today as a bunch of new students sat their placement tests. It was lovely to chill out in the cafe for the first couple of hours and chat to all the new arrivals while we waited for them to be streamed based on their test results. Unfortunately for me, none of the newbies are around my ability level so I’ll be in a private class this month for two hours per day instead of a four hour group class. It’s good and bad: we’re still covering the same amount of content, just faster and even more intensively; but I’m missing out on the extra speaking practise that comes with group learning. I’ll just have to make sure that I use my new spare two hours effectively doing more than just homework. Another of the students who started at the same time as me at a slightly different level will also be in a private class from next week so we’re working on some plans for using those two hours productively.

Once I was in the classroom we spent the two hours doing vocab and grammar revision ahead of jumping back into proper lessons tomorrow. It’s amazing how rusty I feel at the start of each week after just a couple of days off class. It’s a reminder that I will need to work hard to ensure I have daily contact with the language after I finish up here in Amman. It would be a tragedy to do all this hard work just to have it dissolve into thin air due to laziness.

Monday

Today we worked on the text of a short story which made a lovely change from pedestrian dialogues in banks, post offices and barber shops. In the story, two small birds are having a chat in a tree. The first bird suggests that it would be nice to have a home and an address instead of having to move from place to place in search of good weather and food. The second bird notes that the tree they’re perched in has lived for many years, has put down deep roots, and would die if it were moved; in contrast, God gave birds wings so they could fly and be free, and that freedom is only denied them if humans jail them in cages. It was a nice little parable which Penina and I enjoyed discussing over dinner tonight. It was also a good signal that my learning focus is going to shift a little this month to slightly deeper levels of language.

Tuesday

One of my homework tasks from yesterday was to explain the moral of the bird story in Arabic. I stumbled through the couple of messages that Penina and I had discussed last night and then I had a good chat about it with my teacher.

We then cracked open a brand new intermediate textbook which was visibly different from the advanced beginner text we’ve been using for the past two months. The font in this book is smaller and many more words are missing the short vowel markings which native Arabic speakers don’t use but are provided for learners as a crutch. The first unit of the book is based in a language school and we spent the lesson discussing vocab and previewing some of the grammatical and language structure concepts we’ll be covering this month. And already the textbook exercises I was set for homework are appreciably more difficult than those from the last book. I’m quite excited for the challenge, and I’m very glad my teacher is really pushing me to the edge of my ability.

Wednesday

I hurt my back really bad yesterday afternoon which I mention only because it completely threw me in class today. I couldn’t sit comfortably and even using my eraser to rub out writing mistakes left me short of breath. As a consequence my brain was all over the place and I couldn’t put together a coherent thought during the vocab quiz, and I even struggled to join letters correctly when writing. Luckily, my teacher noticed and took it a bit easier on me today. We spent the lesson working on more vocab related to the language centre unit and unpacking some really interesting phrases. Towards the end of the lesson I managed to have some great, confidence-building exchanges with my teacher which really highlighted how far my speaking has come along. My sentences are getting more complex and more fluid, and just generally they seem to come together much more easily. A nice end to a sub-optimal day.

Thursday

My back was a bit better today so I was able to concentrate more in class. We worked through a language centre-based text and a bunch of associated exercises, including a bunch of speaking. I became aware today of how my reading has improved — I am getting a lot better at extracting meaning as I go, at determining the meaning of unknown words and phrases from their context, and at untangling more complicated sentence structures.

Before I handed in last night’s homework at the end of class I had to admit I’d not been able to do a couple of exercises despite spending ages trying to work them out. My teacher gave one of her trademark sneaky corner-mouth smiles and said she wondered how I’d go with those. She gave me the two bits of new info I needed — one exercise involved an unfamiliar word with an irregular conjugation pattern, and the other involved a new exception to the imperative conjugation rules we’d learned last week — and suggested I try them over the weekend.

Anyway, despite the fewer in-class hours this week, but maybe because of the extra study hours, I’m absolutely wrecked as usual. I’m looking forward to a big weekend of sightseeing with the family in between flashcards. This week’s stats:

This was a long and stressful week — everything was leading up to the comprehensive end-of-month exam on Thursday — but in the end, and on balance, my anxiety about the test was offset more than adequately by some nice wins on the learning front and another week of feeling a satisfying sense of achievement.

Sunday

Today’s vocab quiz was epic, running for nearly 90 minutes and shapeshifting on the way from just a vocab quiz into a grammar quiz and a this quiz and a that quiz. It was, as always, fast-paced and stressful, but having got through a solid hour-and-a-half grilling without disgracing myself, I reminded myself to celebrate what I’ve achieved over the past seven weeks.

The rest of the lesson covered a few exercises from the text book on various grammar topics, and then we had a vocab dump of all the colours (masculine and feminine) and associated words. This is good because until today I really only knew white, black, green and brown. My teacher and classmate enjoyed making fun of me because I can’t differentiate between blue, aqua, purple, violet and every other made up shade of the primary colours.

My fun language discoveries today were that the word for “ticket” (tadhkara) is from the same root as “mention” (dhakara), and that the word for “sales” (tanzeelaat) is from the word for “go down” (nazala). And my so-bleedingly-obvious-I-can’t-believe-I-didn’t-realise-it-before discovery for the day is that my two perennial mix-up words, bus and party, are from the same root meaning “many people together”. Derr.

Monday

Today we spent most of the lesson learning the rules for turning present tense verbs into imperatives, and then conjugating them with the five second-person pronouns. Compared to some of the other grammar rules I’ve had to learn which are more exception than rule, this one was pretty easy. It’s still another bunch of tables I need to memorise and convert into practice, though.

We then moved onto a new unit in the book based on a trip to the travel agent. Another dump of vocab and some more dialogues, role plays and exercises. I have no idea how it came up in discussion, but I loved finding out that “moustache” (shaarab) is from the root for “drink” (sharaba).

Tuesday

Shit got real today as we started learning about how to apply and interpret the case markings for nouns. As a native English speaker with no other languages under my belt, I am completely lost when it comes to cases. By contrast, my classmate who is a native French speaker, and who also speaks German, just said “pfft, bring it on.” The rules themselves, in isolation, are not terribly difficult, but I really struggled to understand what exactly we were doing to these words and sentences and *why*. It doesn’t help at all that the only place you see short vowel case markings in written Arabic is in the Quran and in my textbook, and the only time you hear them spoken is in transnational Arabic language news broadcasts. Otherwise, they are completely ignored by normal people communicating in Arabic which makes learning them seem totally academic. But I accept that I still need to learn what they are and how to use them.

Okay, so maybe that’s all bit overdramatic. I do understand that the noun case markings can be useful in complicated sentences when things like subject and object aren’t immediately obvious. That’s the nominative and accusative cases sorted. So what the fuck is going on with the genitive case? Ugh. Deep breath.

Wednesday

I spent last night revising cases and then we spent a good chunk of today going over them again. I feel like I’ve got a pretty good handle on the rules, although every time I start to get too confident our teacher throws a sentence at us that completely stumps me. Undeniably part of the problem is my own deficient ‘80s/‘90s Australian school grammar education, so I guess it’s good that learning Arabic is helping me learn English more better, too.

We then did some more work on the travel agent scenario and I started feeling sad about the impeding departure of my classmate who is going home to France straight after school tomorrow. She’s been a fantastic learning partner for the past four weeks and I’ll very much miss stumbling through role plays with her. We were going to grab a falafel tonight but both of us were too nervous about tomorrow’s test so we decided to swot away instead.

Thursday

Test day.

All students had to take their tests at 9am today no matter their usual class time. That included my wife whose class normally starts at 1pm after I’m finished so we can do a handover of our daughter. So this morning our daughter sat in a classroom with Penina and played iPad games and drew on the whiteboard and ate the endless gifts of chocolate she gets from the centre staff who dote on her endlessly.

My classmate and I were joined in our classroom by five students of a few of the other teachers. Everyone’s test is written by their own teacher and tailored to the individual class. By the two hour mark, everyone else had finished their test and left the classroom, leaving only my classmate and I. When our teacher came in at the 2 hour, 20 minute mark to check that everything was okay we pointed out that this was a long and hard test paper. She just said, “my good students get a hard test,” and walked out with that subtle little smile she does. And after I spent so much time this week revising cases there was one measly question on the test about them!

We finally finished it, though, and headed straight for the coffee machine. After our teacher had graded the papers we went through them together and I was pleased to find that I had done better than I expected — probably around 80-85% (there was no total mark, just ticks and crosses.) I did heaps better than I thought I would with grammar and fell down, as always, on plurals. I also made a few small and silly errors using negation and demonstrative pronouns. But overall I was very happy with how I went and feel that I’m set up nicely for the run home in the next eight weeks. The only other area my teacher thinks I need to focus on is pronunciation when speaking.

It might be a slightly long weekend now (late start next Sunday after all the new students do their placement tests) but there’s no time off flashcards! Here’s this week’s stats:

Sunday

My family and I, along with a couple of other students from the school, went on a daytrip to the town of Jerash yesterday. We had a great day tramping around the Roman ruins, bookended by a couple of eventful bus trips, and also featuring a massive, massive feed of shawarma after we worked up some colossal appetites. This gave me a great story to try to tell in Arabic this morning when our teacher asked us what we did on the weekend. My classmate also had an interesting weekend so our stories and the associated vocab discussion made for an engaging start to the week. In the vocab quiz that followed, our teacher started to shift her focus from just the perfect form of verbs to the imperfect and verbal noun forms which meant a (welcome) headspace shift. I’d started to become comfortable in only remembering past tense forms and this has shook me up at just the right time.

Today’s grammar lesson was about the three forms of “because” in Arabic: broadly “in order to”, “because of” and “because”. It was really good to sit down and formalise the exact rules of use for these because while I have a decent sense of when each one feels right to use, I still get it wrong from time to time. We then started our first topic of the week which was clothes shopping. Big dump of vocab, some dialogue exercises from the text book, and then my classmate and I did a bunch of role plays. I feel less anxious about all of this new vocab than I used to because I’ve now seen how the vocab I learned a few weeks ago is starting to cement itself in my head after weeks of solid flashcard work.

Monday

This morning’s quiz was a great mix of words, role plays and “why/because” questions, all doing a great job to reinforce topics from the past few weeks. I enjoyed learning that “mathematics” (riyaadiyaat) shares the same root as “sport” (riyaadah) because they both involve exercise — one for the brain and one for the body. After the quiz we jumped straight into a big grammar lesson on relative pronouns. This was almost entirely new ground for me because beyond the masculine and feminine singulars I had no idea about these. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to map them to their demonstrative equivalents so I’m not finding them too difficult to recall. I just need to practise using them over and over again to make the whole process less laborious.

After the break my classmate had to leave for an appointment elsewhere so it was just me for two hours. My teacher took the opportunity to really apply the pressure and push me with exercises drawing on content from my first month. She was relentless; deliberately giving me little time to think and no time to recover between questions or challenges. But it worked and by the end of the lesson I felt a real sense of accomplishment.

Tuesday

Over the past month and a half I’ve regularly dreamed about Arabic but last night I really *dreamt* about Arabic. In the dream I found myself in a (stupid, typically dream-like) situation where I had to explain myself but the person asked me to do it in Arabic. When I woke up I vividly recalled my thought processes in the dream as I tried to construct sentences using the vocab and grammar from my classes. It’s quite satisfying to know that this intense waking focus on learning the language continues in the off-hours in my subconscious.

After the vocab quiz we spent most of today’s lesson working through the rules for agreeing numbers with their counted noun. I’ve written about this before and today it was as beast as ever. The rules all make sense but they’re so convoluted that I wonder if I’ll ever be able to apply them smoothly in practice. It was kinda cool watching our teacher, who is usually quite straight and serious, have a friendly little chuckle as my classmate and I facepalmed our way through the explanation of the rules. “It’s easy!” she would keep saying to us as a corner of her mouth turned upwards.

Wednesday

Today’s cool discovery during the vocab quiz was that “clothes hanger” (a’allaaqah) and “relationship” (a’alaaqah) share the same root. I also had cause to ask for the word for “bigot” which generated some mirth because our teacher thought I was saying “piget” because that’s what my French classmate calls baby goats which we had learned the word for recently. I guess you needed to be there. Anyway, there is no direct translation for bigoted in Arabic so our teacher suggested hasaaseeyah mufreetah which is “extremely sensitive”.

Our grammar today was revision on the use of “to” (an) vs. “that” (anna). Most of the time you pair them with verbs in the same way that we do in English (e.g. “want to”, “refuse to”, “think that”. “realise that”) but sometimes they apply in seemingly counter-intuitive ways for an English speaker (e.g. “can to”). We then unpacked the conjugation of irregular verbs with a stressed letter at the end. Compared to some of the other irregular conjugation patterns this one is a piece of piss which is a welcome relief.

We then evolved our shopping focus by covering vocab and dialogues related to the barber shop and hairdresser. Just in time, too! I had a barber visit planned for after class and I was able to use a little vocab to ask for my haircut, although as with most of my experiences going to the barber in the Middle East I basically sat down and let the guy do whatever he was going to do anyway.

Thursday

Overall, today capped off a great week. My confidence is quite high at the moment and I feel like I broke through some sort of threshold this week. I am aware of how much I’ve progressed in all areas, but especially speaking, and it is a lovely feeling of pride and reward for hard work. I know this will come in waves, and there will be weeks ahead when I feel like I’m stagnating despite hard work, but I’ll just enjoy this feeling for right now.

In class today we focused on quantity words (e.g. “all”, “every”, “most of”, “few of”) and the associated grammar. Thankfully, the use of most of them is intuitive and there are few rules I’ll need to consider consciously. We then focused on one last shopping scenario for the week: the jeweller. I learned that the world for “gold” (dhahab) is from the same root as the verb “go” (dhahaba) because, presumably, in the past you had to go somewhere else to get gold. I also learned that the word for “necklace” (a’iqda) is from the same root as “contract” (a’aqada) because they both involve tying something to something else.

Our weekly presentation was postponed to Sunday next week because my classmate is doing even more intensive study than me — six hours a day — and she was swamped with revision for her other class ahead of a test this afternoon.

Here are my flashcard stats for the week (I cracked the millennium).

Sunday

As always after a weekend I was pretty rusty this morning and it took a while to warm up to the vocab quiz and get my brain back in the game. We took some detours throughout the quiz and our discussion about the weekend as new vocab popped up — for example, we explored the difference between the verb haawala (to try to do something) and jarraba (to try, for example, food).

We then revised near demonstrative pronouns. I already knew the singular and plural human versions but didn’t know the dual form versions. Unlike other grammar topics, these seem to stick in my memory quite easily. We spent a while practising them by taking turns to put them into sentences using words from recent study topics. After the break we kept working on the grocer topic and put together a long list of fruits and vegetables and their Arabic names. I love in particular qarnabit for cauliflower, sabaanikh for spinich, mishmish for apricot and foolfool for capsicum/chilli.

Monday

We kicked off the day with a fun version of our vocab quiz: we had to take turns making a story sentence by sentence that took place in a grocer, a bank, and an airport. Our story involved a man who went to the grocer to buy a kiwi but there were none so he flew to New Zealand, withdrew money from a bank, bought a kilo of kiwis, but was then caught at Amman customs upon his return because a Kiwi disease meant importation was temporarily forbidden.

We then followed up yesterday’s lesson on near demonstratives with far demonstratives and I’m feeling really good about it all except for the pronunciation of both plural pronouns which I can’t seem to nail for some reason. Their tangle of alifs, lams, wows, and hamzas just don’t trigger cleanly in my brain. The grammar theme continued after the break with some weak vowel conjugation revision. This is definitely a weak point for me but I feel like today’s revision helped force some progress in internalising the rules.

We rounded out the day with some fun shopping role plays. I’m really enjoying the working relationship I have with my two current classmates.

Tuesday

I dunno what it is with Tuesdays but these hump days are turning out to be when I become hyperaware of what I don’t know and can’t do, and I feel a bit overwhelmed with anxiety about the scale of this task. Today was no different, and it didn’t help that we learned the verb for failing in studies (rasaba). Having said that, and to focus on the positives, today I was aware of how my speaking is progressing, especially with respect to using object pronouns more subconsciously.

Today’s grammar was revision of negation. Like demonstratives the other day, I knew these words but didn’t know the associated grammar rules which govern changes you need to make when using lam (negating past with a present tense verb) and lan (negating future with a present tense verb). The rules seem simple enough and hopefully I can recall them easily when using them. We moved on from the topic of the grocer’s to the butcher’s today, working through vocab for all the carnivorous food and associated stuff like verbs and adjectives for chop, mince, bone etc.

I also enjoyed making connections between words today. I love that the word for “corrupt” (faasid), as in a corrupt person, is the same for “rotten”, as in food. And I suddenly realised that the word for “demonstrative” pronouns (isnaad) is used along with the word for “light” in “traffic light”.

Wednesday

Very little chalk and talk in the first half of today’s lesson, just lots of exercises to help cement this week’s content. Role plays, card-matching games, speaking exercises. Our teacher always picking up vocab and capitalising on teachable moments throughout.

After the break we worked through the process for extracting the root from any Arabic word. This is one of the aspects of the Arabic language that make it a bit impenetrable for learners because the root system means you can’t just look up a word in the dictionary like you can with practically any English word. As with so many other language rules, the rules for extracting the root start out nice and simple and then move into dealing with increasingly niche and edge cases until you get to a point where the rule is “check the dictionary”.

Thursday

Today was test and spoken presentation day and I was very anxious. It got to a point last night where my brain just couldn’t study anymore and I didn’t feel as prepared for the test as I wanted to be. In the end I did okay. 14/20. Again, I let myself down with weak vowel conjugations and a little bit with remembering irregular plurals. Mainly I lost points because I didn’t put enough effort into the writing section. I simply dumped a bunch of vaguely related sentences instead of thinking harder about a writing a more coherent story. But at least I know I’m on track and there are no major problems. I still need to make sure I don’t slacken off even for a day, though.

After a much-needed coffee and a debrief with my classmates, we each delivered our spoken presentations. I talked about our family visit to the Amman Children’s Museum last weekend and described some of the activities that our daughter enjoyed. There were lots of corrections, as usual, but I was pretty proud when I managed one particularly tricky passage (lots of conjugations and object pronouns going back and forth all over the place between clauses) and got a nod from the teacher.

Anyway, flashcard stats are looking good this week!

Sunday

It was a slow start to this week. On the first Sunday of each four week learning cycle, classes are suspended until 11am while all new students take their placement tests and are given an orientation briefing. After that, all the new and existing students are re-streamed into groups based on their placement and end-of-month test results. While Penina did her placement test today I looked after our daughter, and my teacher was away sick so there wasn’t even a short 90 minute lesson for me after that. It was super, super lovely hanging out with my little girl, though, after a month apart.

Monday

Classes started again for me today. Two new students had been streamed into my class which I was very happy about after having been bumped down to two-hour solo lessons by the end of last week. The three of us have different strengths and weaknesses but we’re similar enough that our teacher is confident we can work together productively for maximum progress. I’m very glad for the opportunity to do longer four-hour lessons again with all the speaking that comes along with that. I missed it last week. We started nice and easy with on a unit from a textbook earlier in the series to let the teacher get a sense of the new students’ learning needs. Broadly speaking, I seem to be stronger on vocab and have the increased speaking confidence that comes from having just completed 80 hours of intensive study, while the other two are stronger then me on grammar.

Tuesday

Today we picked up in the textbook from where I finished up last week. Our new topic is the grocer and we got our first big dump of new vocab for the month. The dynamic between the two other students and I is fantastic — such a contrast to last month — and I’ll be quite sad when one of them leaves at the end of next week, and the other at the end of this month.

I’ve been very lucky for the past month to be able to devote 24 hours a day to language learning but having my family here in Amman means that I’ve had to adjust my study schedule. No more flashcards in the morning because I’m running around after my almost-three-year-old, and I can’t get stuck into homework as soon as class finishes because I take over the parenting while Penina is in her class. I do a few flashcards on my phone throughout the afternoon whenever I get five minutes but the only proper time I have for study now is in the evenings once our daughter is asleep. I’m glad that I had the time and space to establish learning routines and actually learn how to learn this stuff, but I’m more glad to be back together with my girls. It just means I need to be clever and disciplined about study from now on.

Wednesday

Big grammar day today. It was good to revisit irregular weak vowel conjugations as it was one of the areas I fell down on in last week’s test — all of my weak points were grammar related. I scored 39 out of 50, however, which is quite a bit better than I felt I’d performed on the day. A reminder that I need to focus on the progress I *am* making as well as the things I’m struggling with. Still, I need to work hard to finish internalising all these tables and put them into practice.

I made one of my regular amusing mistakes in class conversation today: confusing “party” (hafla) for “bus” (haafilah). I’ve tried in the past to remember the difference by thinking of “party bus” (haafilah hafla) but I still get them mixed up. Also, for some mysterious reason I always use wasala (“arrive”) as “return” — I’ve been making this mistake for literally years with Mohanned and it seems I’m going to get it wrong for the rest of my life.

Thursday

Fun but exhausting vocab quiz this morning. The three of us stood at the whiteboard and took turns writing airport-related verbs and nouns that our teacher gave to us in English. After there were about 30-40 up there we had to work together to put together a story. Then we kept working on the grocer topic and did some more work on irregular verbs. After a relatively easy start to the week it was nice to be back to feeling very challenged and as though I’m operating *just* at the edge of my capacity. I’m increasingly convinced that this is the only way to learn this stuff properly. If you’re feeling comfortable you’re not making progress.

We were given a heads-up for the weekly spoken presentation starting again from next Thursday. Next week will be five minutes, the week after ten, and the final week of the month 15. I’m going to have to start putting more thought into preparing these than just trying to write it the night before.

And since this blog is sort of my Garmin or Fitbit for language learning, here’s this week’s flashcard stats:

Sunday

The weather over the weekend was atrocious with strong winds, freezing rain and snow smashing Amman non-stop for a few days. So apart from one mad dash to Weibdeh for dinner and a beer on Friday night with some of the other students, I tried to make all my enforced inside time productive with study. At this morning’s vocab quiz, like the previous Sundays’ quizzes, I was a bit rusty but at least I didn’t disgrace myself.

After 45 minutes of vocab we launched straight into a long grammar lesson about present tense cases. I’m struggling with this, to be honest. I understand each of the rules individually but I’m finding it so hard to apply them in practice. We worked through some exercises in class, and I had to write more sentences as homework, but this is going to be a battle for me to absorb and make functional.

I spent the evening revising grammar as my end of month test is coming up this Thursday. I made tables of all the conjugation rules, past and present, and all the different kinds of irregular. Something about the process of making my own — writing it out myself, making formatting decisions etc. — means it sticks a little bit better (also, I tried a colour trick recommended to me by a relative and it seems to work). I need to get past having to visualise grammar tables in my head, but.

Monday

It became clear this morning that my classmate wasn’t coming back so, as with yesterday, it was just me for four hours. However, I’ll be dropping back to two hour personal lessons for the next three days this week as per the policy at the language school when you aren’t in a group. There are about 20 new students starting next Sunday, though, so I’m hopeful there will be at least one other who is at my level so I go back to four hour lessons.

First up this morning my teacher quizzed me on verbs and I had to write each one on the board. Then, once again, I had to make a story out of them. This was *hard*. I ended up with over 30 verbs and the activity was much more difficult than it was with nouns last week. When I finally got to the end and sat down, spent after all the diversions and tangents to unpack grammar, I looked at my watch and saw that a whole hour had gone past! We then started a new topic — the family — and worked through the routine of new vocab, a dialogue, and then several exercises to cement it all. We finished up with a lesson on object pronouns which, like yesterday’s lesson on cases, I understood but found I had to really had to grind gears in my head to put it into practice.

My head was spinning by the end of this four hours. My teacher asked me to go to the board at the end of the lesson and teach her the rules for cases from yesterday but I was done. I couldn’t form a coherent thought and I couldn’t shift focus from thinking about object pronouns. She took pity on me and let me go to curl up in the foetal position in the cafeteria.

I did more grammar revision tonight, building tables like last night but with the cases and object pronouns. Laying it out in a way that seems logical to me really helps, and I felt confident by the time I went to bed that I had a handle on it.

Tuesday

Because we were only doing two hours today the vocab quiz was a lot shorter. My teacher asked me yesterday to revise plurals from the bank and post office scenarios and they were the subject of today’s quiz. I did okay, maybe 60-70%, but need to focus more on plurals in general. I was then reunited with the creepy doll and had to point out all the body parts. After that we launched into another new topic: the seasons and weather. Another new load of vocab and then conversation about weather patterns in Jordan and Australia. Finally, I had to go to the board and do the teaching I didn’t do yesterday. And I think I managed to explain the cases in a mostly correct and understandable way.

With only a couple of days until the test, and an extra two hours up my sleeve in the afternoon, I focused after class on revising vocab from everything we’ve done this month.

Wednesday

We didn’t muck around with a vocab quiz this morning, launching directly instead into a fluid discussion about the seasons and the weather, working on vocab as it cropped up throughout the conversation. The improvement in my speaking compared to a month ago is definitely noticeable now and it feels less tortured and stilted. However, I still find myself coming up against brick walls far too often when I can’t think of how to structure a sentence the way I’d like to say it in English. In particular, I simply don’t have the recall of verbal nouns or a good sense of how they work in a sentence. Related, I’m also finding that my writing is getting faster and more natural, although I still need to hit Google Translate far too often to check spelling. We then did some work on if/then conditional sentence grammar before a bit of a chat about what I might encounter on the end of month test tomorrow.

Thursday

I was really nervous about this test. I needed every minute of the two hours to work on it. My teacher is going to mark it over the weekend and let me know the results on Sunday. I’m confident I passed but think I could’ve done better. I fell apart on stupid weak vowel irregular conjugation — my brain was spinning around with rules and I just couldn’t get clarity. More revision needed on that.

This afternoon it was lovely to wind down with a bunch of other Arabic- and English-language students at the centre with a fun “pizza war” event. We formed mixed teams of Jordanians and foreigners and had to do battle with silly games like having to spell or do tongue twisters in the other language in order to win crucial ingredients for pizzas we were constructing at out tables. After they were cooked we relaxed and swapped exam war stories over plates of delicious pizza.

With Sunday marking the start of a new four week teaching period I’ll start later in the morning after all the new students have finished their placement tests and orientations. I’ll remain with my current teacher, which I’m happy about, and hopefully a couple of the new students will be streamed into my class. Oh, and my wife is one of the new students! She’s starting from scratch but it will be awesome to be able to discuss our shared experience learning the language and help each other out.

Sunday

By last night my flashcard deck was 351 cards thick and I had completely caught up with all the vocab from the first two weeks. I refuse to do the maths on what this means for 14 more weeks of lessons, though. I did several study sessions throughout the weekend and already I could see from the stats tracker that I was making progress.

First up this morning was my mid-month test. Even though it was completely formative and designed to help the teacher plan for the second half of the month, I was really anxious. All I knew to anticipate was that it would be two hours, fully written, and that anything we’d touched on over the past two weeks was fair game. In preparation I worked really hard on vocab memorisation and spent the weekend revising all the grammar we’ve done so far.

The test included sections such as:

• read a text and answer questions (in Arabic)
• vocab quiz (including opposites and plurals)
• fill in the blanks with prepositions and adverbs
• identify types of hamzas
• identify types and components of sentences
• conjugate regular and irregular verbs
• write a text using provided words

Ultimately I scored 15/20 which is respectable but means there’s still work to be done. I did better than I expected on the vocab bits, fell apart completely on sentences (I didn’t even think to learn the names of components in Arabic), but went pretty well with the rest.

On the coffee break after the test I was chatting to the guy who runs the language school cafeteria (large Americano, please) and he asked how I was going with it all. He passed on a tip for speaking Arabic that one of his Quran tutors gave him: if you’re having trouble pronouncing something, try talking while smiling. Doing so forces you to use all of the muscles in your face instead of just those at the front and middle of your mouth. I tried it and it feels … weird.

After the test we launched straight into role play based on a visit to the doctor and rounded out the day with some grammar exercises. I felt relieved that the test was done but know I can’t slacken off to make sure I’m properly prepared for the summative exam in two weeks. Tonight I just smashed flashcards, trying desperately to offset my growing anxiety about the scale of the task. The only thing that gives me any hope is slowly, slowly watching the green on the stats bar charts grow taller. And this sounds strange, but there are a lot of words I keep getting wrong at the same time I am getting closer and closer to getting them correct — I have more of the letters correct but maybe in the wrong order, or I have an increasingly accurate notion of how the word sounds in my head.

Monday

We kept going with the medical theme this morning after the vocab quiz. First up were a bunch of vocab word/picture match games, and then, because we don’t yet have enough vocab to learn, we went through all the names for body parts using a creepy doll prop and terrible diagrams because none of us can draw properly. My classmate and I then took turns describing a body part in whatever Arabic we could muster and the other having to guess it.

After the break we worked on another medical dialogue from the textbook — this one about someone visiting his friend in the hospital. Homework was relatively simple today: take the text we’d just studied and re-write it with women in the two roles instead of men, and with the necessary grammatical changes.

I met with my language partner for 90 minutes early this evening. We spent some time working on each other’s homework together (he’s currently studying the present perfect form, which meant I had to learn the rules, too!) and then we had a lovely casual chat for a while about various topics.

Tuesday

My classmate was on time this morning! And our teacher mixed up the standard vocab quiz which was a refreshing change. My classmate and I had to stand at the whiteboard and take turns filling it with words from our studies so far this month, and then after we’d put a few dozen on there we had to use every single one in a story that we built together out loud sentence by sentence. The whole thing took about 45 minutes and was exhausting. No matter how much of a grammatical tangle we got ourselves in we had to work it out, all while drawing on not just the vocab on the board but our whole repertoire, and without any books to refer to. This is exactly the sort of pressure environment that forces you to learn, however all I wanted afterwards was an enormous coffee and then maybe a nap.

But there was more learning to be done. We spent the next 90 minutes working on a text which was a noticeable step up for us — it contained a lot of unfamiliar vocabulary, and more complex sentences and grammar. After working through it and unpacking the language together, we each had to retell the story and then answer questions posed to us by the teacher who is deliberately starting to talk faster in the classroom as a subtle pressure tactic.

I think today’s lesson was the most taxing I’ve done so far — something about all the speaking and the sheer breadth of the vocab we’re starting to have to draw from — so it was a relief to do some chalk and talk grammar (revision of present tense irregular conjugation with weak vowels) to finish up the lesson. All I had to do was sit, listen, think and write.

Wednesday

One of the things I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this week is a peculiarity of the Arabic language from an English-speaking point of view: you’re not allowed to use certain sentence fragments the way we do in English. For example, before each lesson our teacher asks what we did the night before, and the other day I answered in Arabic but in fragments the way I would in English: “Homework. Dinner. Book.” But this won’t fly in Arabic because you need to use the verbs for each of those nouns even though they’re implied. So instead: “Did homework. Ate dinner. Read my book.” And then in a role play today I tried “I then went to the cafe for coffee” which won’t work unless I added the verb: “I went to the cafe to drink coffee.” I’ve also learned some cool words this week like spider (aankaboot) and nose (anf), and discovered weird trivia like the word ‘stop’, as in bus stop, is the exact same word as ‘situation’.

As part of the vocab quiz this morning I had to go to the whiteboard, draw a person, and label all the body parts. No notes. My heart (qalb) sank because I’d reviewed the body parts over coffee and flashcards this morning and performed miserably. But to my surprise I managed to correctly label maybe half of them, even if I needed some help with spelling. I guess this proves that stuff *is* sinking into my subconscious as a result of the relentless study focus, even if I am frustrated at not being able to cement things consciously as fast as I’d like. Next up we went through a bunch of adverbs of time and used them in speaking exercises, and then we started another scenario (transport) which meant another dump of vocab.

Thursday

In contrast to Tuesday’s morale slump, today felt really good. I enjoyed a tangible sense of progress and was filled with hope that I’ll be able to keep out in front of the relentless pace of learning.

It was just me today as my classmate didn’t show up. And just like Tuesday, my teacher wrote my vocab quiz answers on the white board as I gave them until it was full of maybe thirty words or so. The words were from across all the topics we’ve done so far this month: recreation, the beach, the bank, the post office, the doctor and transport. Then I had to stand up, tell a story using all of the words, and cross them off the board as I went. It was actually quite fun unlike Tuesday, and I was a bit proud of how much my speaking has improved in three weeks and how much smoother my sentence construction is on the fly. This was followed by the introduction of some more transport vocab and some picture-matching exercises.

Grammar today was present tense conjugation with irregular verbs that end with a weak vowel. The rule for words that end with ya (ي) is brutal, and even my teacher shrugged and said “at least there are not many of these words”. After the coffee break we just talked and it felt great. My teacher asked me question after question about Australia using all the vocab we’ve covered, and as we drew on new vocab I dutifully copied it down into my book. Along with this morning’s vocab quiz, this activity was a great confidence builder. We finished off with my weekly five minute spoken presentation — this week I re-told this story. I’d needed to hit Google Translate for quite a bit of vocab for this one so there were a lot of corrections as I spoke.

Before I let myself relax for the weekend I sat down at my computer and got up to date with my flashcards. At the end of week three my deck stands at 532. I’m still getting a lot wrong but I can also sense real progress, and the stats are promising, too.

A good, positive end to the week.

Sunday

I spent the weekend doing bits and pieces of other work but I made sure to open my books and check in with last week’s vocab from time to time, and then this morning I got up a bit earlier than usual so I could do a long session of revision over coffee. I thought that would be enough. But the vocab quiz at the start of today’s lesson was a bit of a train wreck, although I think the disaster was somewhat amplified by the absence of my classmate who was late. This left me sitting like a roo in the sights of a gun held by my teacher who shot word after word after word at me. By 9:15am I had resolved to start using flashcards and build them into my study routine. This morning’s quiz scared me with the sudden realisation that if I was already starting to fall behind on day 6, I’d be ruined by the end of four months.

The first half of today’s lesson continued on with the topic of the bank from last week. We did some more exercises and then, when my classmate arrived, some role play. To get us out to the much needed coffee break we did a bit of casual past tense regular verb conjugation. After the break we started a new topic: the post office. Again, we began by listing some relevant vocab and then reading through some dialogues before doing a combination of exercises and role plays. I found the post office vocab a little easier than the bank for some reason, although moving on from the bank in class meant that it was completely up to me to keep using and embedding that bank vocab along with the beach vocab.

Homework was to write a post office-themed story using our new words and to complete a few conjugation exercises from the text book. Once I’d finished the homework this afternoon, I downloaded a flashcard app for my phone and computer and started building decks. Inputting the cards is pretty time and labour intensive but hopefully worth it.

Monday

The last thing I did last night in bed last night before I turned out my reading lamp was flashcards on my phone. And the first thing I did after I got out of bed this morning was flashcards at my computer while drinking coffee. But … I think it’s working. I noticed a definite improvement in this morning’s vocab quiz — I’m still drawing a blank on some words, and mixing up the order of letters in others, but I performed respectably compared to yesterday’s sad effort. If that’s after barely 12 hours of flashcard use hopefully the system will really pay off in the long term.

Today’s lesson started with irregular past tense verb conjugation which, like many grammar rules, is easy enough to understand but difficult to translate into practice. Ultimately, this stuff is only going to stick as I use it in conversation and learn the way words sound through repetition. We rounded out the four hours with more post office activities which work really nicely to reinforce the vocab at the same time as developing speaking skills and mucking around with grammar. Homework was a bunch of conjugation activities.

I spent a couple of hours this evening creating flashcards in my app trying to work my way through the backlog from last week. I gave up when I hit 100 cards and am already looking forward to the weekend so I can get up to date.

Tuesday

The flashcards are really working. My anxieties about learning vocab are slowly being overwhelmed by the sense of progress. It’s going to be a shitload of hard work but the task doesn’t feel hopeless anymore.

Today was another day with a heavy grammar focus. We started by revising the three forms of plural, including the first and most common form which is “broken” or “no form” as our teacher called it. Basically, there’s no point trying to learn rules for these, you’ve just got to remember or guess. We then revised the rules for the two forms of sentence, nominal and verbal. I have to admit that over the years I’ve gotten in the habit of using predominantly verbal sentences because of the much simpler verb conjugations you can use in them, but no more. I have to suck it up and start using nominal and practising my conjugations. We finished off the day with some fun speaking exercises about electronic communication, drawing on associated vocab. I really love the words for app (tatbeeq) and chat (dardasha).

Wednesday

My classmate is often late for class and today was no exception, which means the vocab quiz is much more intense for me than when she’s there. These quizzes often run for 15 minutes or more so by the end my head is spinning and I am really worked up which in a strange way is very similar to a good warm up session before physical activity. Thanks largely to the flashcards, I did well at the quiz.

Today we slammed grammar. More irregular verb conjugation and then a bunch of work on the forms of the hamza. I was really pleased with the hamza session especially because I *got it* even though I’ve obviously been reading, writing and saying the hamza for years. We rounded out the final hour with a bunch of spoken exercises based on last week’s topic of the beach and I was shocked to walk out of the classroom with *no new vocab* from the day. This was a great help for my campaign to work through my backlog and input everything into my flashcard tattbeeq.

After class I worked on my weekly five minute presentation for tomorrow’s class, and then met my new language partner who is studying English at the centre. He and I will meet weekly to have conversation in both languages and help each other with our homework.

Thursday

I arrived set for my presentation but didn’t feel as confident as last week because of all the new vocab it contained, even though it was exactly the vocab I’ve been learning intensely for the past week. I think I was also anxious because I felt a personal expectation to perform a lot better than last week even though it has been — exactly that — just one week.

After the morning vocab quiz we launched into a new topic based on hospital, the doctor and illness. I felt two conflicting emotions: excitement at a new topic, and anxiety about another dump of words to learn. We approached this topic in the same way as the others, starting with a vocab brainstorm and then straight into a dialogue in the text book which introduced even more vocabulary. We worked on the dialogue and did some role play to round out the first half of the lesson. After the break we started work on regular present tense verb conjugation which, I have to admit, I’ve always struggled with. I, we, he, she, they (plural masculine) and you (singular masculine) are fine, but I often draw a blank when trying to conjugate they (plural feminine; dual feminine and masculine) and you (singular feminine; dual feminine and masculine). So I know I have to really pull my finger out and internalise these tables once and for all. Finally, I gave my presentation and it went about the same as last week, although I attracted more corrections from the teacher because I was trying to be too tricky with grammar and failing.

After class my brain was ruined from the week. Four of the other students and I met when everyone’s lessons had finished to go downtown and do a bit of touristing, and I could see it in everyone’s faces that the week had taken its toll. We spent a lovely few hours wandering around the citadel and the old city before sitting down in a restaurant to a table full of delicious food. But by 6:30pm we were all ready to go home! This intensive learning business is exhausting.

We have our mid-month test on Sunday so this weekend is going to be all about study. But my first task: catching up on flashcards.

Monday

My first full day of class this week was Monday since Sunday was devoted to admin and an entrance exam. Overnight, one student who felt the level of the class was too high for her had dropped down to a class below, so we were now only two students. A nice small group.

After exchanging pleasantries our teacher launched straight in and asked in Arabic what we had done the previous evening. As we stumbled through our answers, she compiled a list of vocabulary on the white board that we then copied down and discussed. This would be a constant feature throughout the week as she kept the pressure on us to build our vocabulary.

While my classmate and I are relatively close in ability, we obviously have different learning histories, strengths and weaknesses. So, the planned component of the lesson began with some simple revision of prepositions and adverbs of place to warm us up and help the teacher determine what the focus of our learning for the month should be. While I was already pretty solid on this stuff it was good to go over it again to refresh and cement.

We then moved onto talking about the theme of recreation. We started by reviewing a list of relevant vocab and then using it in various situations. The pace was good — challenging but not overwhelming — and our teacher employed a variety of methods including chalk and talk, role play, quizzes and individual work. She also made us stand up and move around the room at regular intervals which worked really well to kickstart our brains.

Suddenly, it was 1pm and the lesson was finished. Four hours had flown by and my head was spinning. But I was also buzzing with optimism and eagerly sat down for the afternoon in the language centre’s study area to review the day’s material and do my homework (write passages of text using the prepositions and adverbs we’d revised, and also using the recreation vocab). I also started thinking about the five minute presentation we’d learned that we would have to give on Thursday. I was a little bit anxious about it, to be honest.

Tuesday

I tried to start building good study habits into my routine today by making Arabic the first thing I did upon waking … after making a coffee, that is. I sat down with my brew and revised all of yesterday’s vocab and practised putting it into sentences. It felt good getting into the right headspace even before I started getting ready for the day — I was thinking about Arabic in the shower and didn’t need any warming up by the time I was sat in my chair at school at 8:59am.

After a round of good mornings and some small talk (in Arabic), our teacher launched straight into a vocab quiz, asking us to give her the Arabic for a bunch of words we’d learned yesterday. I felt a bit smug about having done some early morning revision! We then did a few activities related to yesterday’s topic of recreation before moving on to revision of question words, just like yesterday’s work with prepositions and adverbs.

By the halftime 20 minute break I really needed a coffee. My head was filling up with new vocab and I found myself extrapolating the learning pace out to the end of each 20 hour week, and indeed, to the end of the 16 week course. The maths just reinforces that I will have to work extremely hard to keep up.

In the second half of the lesson we moved onto the topic of the beach and the seaside, and spent two hours learning vocab and doing a range of spoken and written exercises. It was pretty funny talking about umbrellas and sandcastles and sunscreen in Amman in the middle of winter.

For homework we had to write a story about a trip to the beach using today’s vocab.

Wednesday

Last night I found myself thinking about Arabic words — how they are spelled and pronounced — as I fell asleep. And then I dreamt about them! Even after just a few days it’s being hammered into my subconscious which is great.

Today’s class started again with a fast-paced vocab quiz, but this time drawing on two days’ worth of words. There seems to be no real pattern governing which words stick in my mind and which don’t, and as usual some words just refuse to stick for whatever reason. Having said that, my revision routine does seem to be bearing fruit as I did better at the quiz than I thought I would.

We’d been instructed to buy a text book yesterday and today we started working from it. First up was a unit based on visits to the bank. We started with some vocab and then read through a few dialogues, picking up unfamiliar words on the way. Again, our teacher used a good variety of activities including role plays, games and worksheets.

When you’re so engrossed in the work it’s amazing how fast four hours can whiz past, and today I was again shocked when it hit 1pm. As is becoming habit, I bunkered down in the study area for the afternoon to do homework and prepare for my five minute presentation tomorrow.

Thursday

I feel really happy with my little study routine (afternoon of homework and revision, revision first thing in the morning over coffee) after this week and I can tell it’s paying off, even though I felt a little overwhelmed by this morning’s vocab quiz which drew on a week’s worth of new words.

We spent the first half of today’s lesson continuing with the topic of the bank, and then we did some quick revision of possessive pronouns. These topics (recreation, the beach, the bank) are pretty random but they’ve been great vehicles for learning. Alongside building vocab, and throughout everything we’ve done this week, our teacher has addressed grammar both by design and by taking advantage of teachable moments. I feel like my general Arabic skills have been enhanced at the same time as I’ve mastered how to tell my friends what to bring to the beach and go into a bank and open an account.

Finally, I had to give my five minute presentation. We were allowed to refer to notes but I tried really hard not to read from them. I’d written about my first week in Jordan: nice and easy due to basic vocab and simple first-person past tense verb conjugations. I think I did pretty good considering it’s only week one — I only triggered half a dozen grammar corrections. I recorded audio on my phone so I can compare it to the presentation I give in 15 weeks. I hope I have cause to cringe really hard when I listen back to this one.