Reflections

I'm at the end of another week of classes, and I am leaving for Turkey in less than 12 hours!!! I feel a tab bit spoiled that I get to have a vacation after being here less than a month, but I'm also so excited that I don't really care. :) I am so grateful for the chance to connect with some friends and to spend time being "Western" again. Because I live in a more conservative area of the city, I have to dress appropriately. And honestly, most of the time I really don't mind wearing longer shirts and long sleeves and pants, (even though that doesn't hide the fact that I'm a Westerner) but I do remember the feeling of being able to actually be a tourist in India and wear what I would normally wear, and I'm looking forward to that again.

As far as classes go...we are starting to be able to write sentences! Small accomplishments to be sure, but I'm hoping that soon there will be bigger accomplishments to mark. :) We are working with a list of about 60-70+ nouns, and 24+ verbs, and now I can conjugate those verbs into the past tense to create sentences. We also have added to our list most of the question words (i.e. how, where, who, what), pronouns and today we added some prepositions and learned how to make a word possessive (i.e. my book, your house).

All of what I am learning is what they call "foosa", or classical Arabic. I have had a lot of people ask me why I didn't learn the spoken Arabic first, since it is different than foosa, but I feel like this is a good starting point, for me at least. In a few months I'll be able to read and write pretty well, and from there I can work with a language partner to adjust the vocabulary to spoken Arabic. Right now it's hard for me to even wrap my tongue around the sounds anyway, so I feel like at least I'm moving ahead, instead of being mired in a mess of trying to get sounds to come out of my month that I haven't used before. :)

Look for pictures from Turkey in the next few days!