5 days a week for 4 hours a day, you could find us at the Qasid Institute working hard in Arabic class. In this post, I hope to give you a little more of an insight into what Arabic class looked like. The way the class was set up, we had 2 hours with one teacher in the morning and 2 hours with another teacher in the afternoon. Usually, the morning was more focused on vocabulary (مفردات) and the afternoon was more focused on grammar (قواعد) but it was pretty fluid. While starting a language from the beginning was frustrating at times, it also meant we got to play tons of fun games to reinforce each of the four core skills: reading, writing, speaking and listening (vocab and grammar are incorporated in all of these). To learn vocab, we played a lot of charades and Pictionary where we would act or draw different vocab and people would have to guess what the word was. To improve our listening and speaking skills, we did lots of funny role plays where we would each assume different characters in random situations and act out what would happen using our vocab we had learned that week. To improve our syntax, we would be given a bunch of random words and had to put them into a grammatically correct sentence. To improve reading and writing, we would write different stories and hand them to our peers to read. Arabic is a really really challenging language to learn. There are 2 letters that make the T sound, 2 letters that make the S sound, 2 letters that make the D sound, 4 letters that make the TH sound, 3 letters that make the K sound, 2 letters that make the H sound and a couple of letters that make sounds that don't occur in the English language. Other than the challenging pronunciation, the grammar is super challenging and each plural is a completely different word from the singular form. However, I am super happy with how far I got in the Arabic language while I was in Jordan. By the end, I felt that I could really confidently have a conversation with my host family on a variety of topics, performed an 8 minute memorized oral presentation on Arab Cities and was able to hold a 30 minute phone conversation just in Arabic! Coming out of this trip, I definitely hope to pursue fluency at home. Role Play of a Phone Conversation Grammar Lesson Presentation on Arab Cities. Every week, everyone would present on a different aspect of our topic. People's topics ranged from Jordanian Diplomatic Relations and Religion in Daily Life in Jordan to Jordanian Food and A Typical Family.
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We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us. !أهلا و ساهلاHi! I'm Sophia, a high schooler from the San Francisco Bay Area. I received a scholarship through the State Dept. to study Arabic in Jordan in the summer of 2016. Categories
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