Of Pimsleur and Life

I'm learning Arabic! I can say "Afwan, inta b'taaref Ingleezee, yah ach? Ana ma'baaref Arabi." This would be me saying to a taxi driver, for example, "Excuse me, do you speak English, sir? I don't speak Arabic." And he could reply, "Ana ma'baaref Ingleeze. Inti b'taarefi schwaye t'Arabi, yah anisay? Naam. Inti Amerkey? La, ana Breetaaneyah" Or in other words, "I don't speak English. Do you speak a little Arabic, miss? Yes. Are you American? No, I am British."

I'm so excited. My sister bought me a belated birthday present of the first 15 lessons of Arabic Pimsleur. I downloaded it onto my phone so I can listen to it anytime and it's a really great way to start learning. Well, for me it technically isn't learning the language from scratch because it already sounds familiar to my ears. I just can't understand beyond very basic everyday conversation.

I'm not being paid to promote Pimsleur, but I do want to share why it's a helpful way for me to learn the language. Two weeks ago I sat in a formal Arabic language learning class but after an hour and a half I felt like I knew even less than I had before. Through no fault of the teacher, but because my learning style is very much perfectionistic along with hands-on, I wasn't learning very fast.

Pimsleur takes a basic conversation and breaks it down into syllables, then builds it back up again with a lot of repetition by a native Arabic speaker. Because I'm a perfectionist, I enjoy the challenge of trying to match my pronunciation to the speaker. I also don't want to sit for long so the 30-minute lessons are perfect. I loved that after going through the first lesson, I could perfectly understand the basic conversation that was given and repeated again at the end. I've now added some words to my vocabulary and in the second lesson I'm building on what I learned in the first.

Language learning is a very slow process. I did it naturally, when learning French as a child from ages 4.5-9 where my friends all spoke French. I did it formally, when learning Spanish for a year in high school through a correspondence course with tapes to listen to and in college where we watched a fun soap-opera type of dialogue for class and memorized Bible verses in Spanish. Now I'm combining my natural picked-up-from-9-years language with a formal process but the actual learning process is more organic. Of course, the true test comes when I actually get out there and try to speak what I've learned. I may actually make sense but then after the first couple of sentences I will have run out of what to say!

In a way, language learning reminds me of life. Life isn't easy and to achieve anything worthwhile we have to be persistent, keep practicing what we know, be willing to make mistakes in order to get better, and surround ourselves with people who are comfortable in the areas we are weak so we can learn from them and grow. This is my experience here. At times it seems I'm stretching beyond what I would have imagined possible but I'm thankful for this growth because it helps solidify my beliefs while at the same time learning to accept others without judging them.