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I've been sick for over a week now with some sort of chest rattling respiratory nonsense; I'm finally feeling better, though I'm still coughing up the residual junk left in my lungs. >_< I hate being sick.
So! I'm (re)taking elementary Arabic this summer- class meets three times a week for three to four hours a session, and it's been pretty awesome so far.
I'm totally That Girl, though- the one who jumps in with the answer all the time, and wants to discuss obscure points of grammar with the instructor, and is generally an insufferable know-it-all. (I'm an insufferable know-it-all under the best of circumstances; this class is only exacerbating that tendency of mine.)
I remember a lot from the first time I took the class, three years ago (and holy shit, has it really been three years? It's really been three years. D:). And right now we're still struggling through the alphabet, which I know pretty damn well at this point, what with the Persian and all- I feel a little guilty for having so many unfair advantages over my classmates, but I also have a lot of random blind spots that sort of make up for it. (Declining nouns? Psh. Screw you, short vowels! Screw you.) There are no heritage or native speakers in the class, so we're all sort of in the same, clueless boat.
I'm still absolute shite at speaking and listening comprehension (in this, and every language I encounter, including English), although my obsessive listening to the textbook DVDs has helped a bit with recognizing those fsking emphatic consonants. My speaking skills will always be subpar, though- I had a moment of absolute and utter meltdown in front of the class on Friday during dialogue practice. I'd be better at that part of the lessons if we didn't have to do them while standing in front of the board; that added layer of performativity makes me useless. I broke down into hysterical nervous laughter for about a minute and a half, with the phrase "'Uhibu jamal!"* repeating over and over in my head. (Laughing is a nervous reflex for me; when I'm embarrassed- either for myself or for someone else- I turn bright red and giggle. I spend a very large part of every class with my face in my hands. It's the sort of problem that snowballs- once I start, I feel mortified that I'm doing it, and then it gets worse. *sigh*)
Hysterical meltdowns aside, I really love the class, and I'm actually learning a lot of the stuff I completely missed the first time around. If I hadn't already taken the class and been studying Persian, however, I would be absolutely and utterly lost. The instructor is three different shades of terrible- she's a lovely person, and occasionally hilarious, but as a teacher, she's awful.
In a language class, with people who, by an large, have had absolutely no exposure to the language in question, and a language like Arabic that uses a totally different writing system and a contains a vast number of sounds and nuances that English just doesn't have, you cannot expect the students to pick things up after hearing them once. It just isn't reasonable- and refusing to answer students' questions because you have this expectation is both cruel and counterproductive.
My Persian professor would occasionally pull a similar trick, but the difference is that he would tell us to ask each other- and since my Persian class was populated primarily by native and heritage speakers (there was something like a 3:1 ratio of heritage speakers to non-heritage), this was actually useful. When the only person in the room who speaks Arabic says "No, I won't answer your question; you should figure it out yourself," I just want to beat my head against a wall. How is that helpful? How is that in any way encouraging the learning process, when so many of the students are frustrated and confused? What other resources are we supposed to use in the classroom, when none of us legitimately have any idea what the answer is?
She then gets angry with us for helping each other out. >_< I understand that it can be incredibly difficult to find the right balance between reinforcement through repetition and giving away all the answers, but honestly, when we're barely two weeks into an elementary level course, I feel like it's okay to err on the side of "LET ME REPEAT THIS UNTIL IT STICKS TO YOUR BRAIN." Because it's just not going to stick, otherwise.
I had a moment of blinding rage during our quiz on Friday, when she refused to repeat the words in the listening/dictation portion, after going through all of them quickly, and speaking them at a conversational speed. She actually looked surprised when we asked her to repeat them, and only after polling the class to see how many people needed to hear them again (all of us) did she finally relent- but she warned us that she wasn't going to keep coddling us like this in the future first.
If I were taking the class for the first time, I would be in absolute despair, I think. I also feel that ridicule is a tool of limited use in an elementary language class; were the classroom environment less casual and cordial (due in large part to the awesomeness of my fellow classmates), things could get quite toxic rather quickly. (It's not so much that the instructor is cruel- she's just extraordinarily blunt, and finds our mistakes hilarious. Given that I'm in a constant state of barely controlled nervous laughter most of the time, I suppose I can't really fault her there.)
And yet! I'm still enjoying the class, but I do have a number of hugely unfair advantages. I'm certain I could have tested out of Elementary 1 with no problem, and possibly Elementary 2 with a decent effort, but that would have left me seriously struggling with speaking/listening in Intermediate. I know my own limitations; I don't learn languages very well independently, and the intensive format of summer session classes works well for me.
*"I like camel!" To be fair, the guy I was doing the dialogue with had brought in a picture of himself and a camel that day, so it's not like this was totally out of context. Even so, it was kind of a moment of epic fail on my part.
So! I'm (re)taking elementary Arabic this summer- class meets three times a week for three to four hours a session, and it's been pretty awesome so far.
I'm totally That Girl, though- the one who jumps in with the answer all the time, and wants to discuss obscure points of grammar with the instructor, and is generally an insufferable know-it-all. (I'm an insufferable know-it-all under the best of circumstances; this class is only exacerbating that tendency of mine.)
I remember a lot from the first time I took the class, three years ago (and holy shit, has it really been three years? It's really been three years. D:). And right now we're still struggling through the alphabet, which I know pretty damn well at this point, what with the Persian and all- I feel a little guilty for having so many unfair advantages over my classmates, but I also have a lot of random blind spots that sort of make up for it. (Declining nouns? Psh. Screw you, short vowels! Screw you.) There are no heritage or native speakers in the class, so we're all sort of in the same, clueless boat.
I'm still absolute shite at speaking and listening comprehension (in this, and every language I encounter, including English), although my obsessive listening to the textbook DVDs has helped a bit with recognizing those fsking emphatic consonants. My speaking skills will always be subpar, though- I had a moment of absolute and utter meltdown in front of the class on Friday during dialogue practice. I'd be better at that part of the lessons if we didn't have to do them while standing in front of the board; that added layer of performativity makes me useless. I broke down into hysterical nervous laughter for about a minute and a half, with the phrase "'Uhibu jamal!"* repeating over and over in my head. (Laughing is a nervous reflex for me; when I'm embarrassed- either for myself or for someone else- I turn bright red and giggle. I spend a very large part of every class with my face in my hands. It's the sort of problem that snowballs- once I start, I feel mortified that I'm doing it, and then it gets worse. *sigh*)
Hysterical meltdowns aside, I really love the class, and I'm actually learning a lot of the stuff I completely missed the first time around. If I hadn't already taken the class and been studying Persian, however, I would be absolutely and utterly lost. The instructor is three different shades of terrible- she's a lovely person, and occasionally hilarious, but as a teacher, she's awful.
In a language class, with people who, by an large, have had absolutely no exposure to the language in question, and a language like Arabic that uses a totally different writing system and a contains a vast number of sounds and nuances that English just doesn't have, you cannot expect the students to pick things up after hearing them once. It just isn't reasonable- and refusing to answer students' questions because you have this expectation is both cruel and counterproductive.
My Persian professor would occasionally pull a similar trick, but the difference is that he would tell us to ask each other- and since my Persian class was populated primarily by native and heritage speakers (there was something like a 3:1 ratio of heritage speakers to non-heritage), this was actually useful. When the only person in the room who speaks Arabic says "No, I won't answer your question; you should figure it out yourself," I just want to beat my head against a wall. How is that helpful? How is that in any way encouraging the learning process, when so many of the students are frustrated and confused? What other resources are we supposed to use in the classroom, when none of us legitimately have any idea what the answer is?
She then gets angry with us for helping each other out. >_< I understand that it can be incredibly difficult to find the right balance between reinforcement through repetition and giving away all the answers, but honestly, when we're barely two weeks into an elementary level course, I feel like it's okay to err on the side of "LET ME REPEAT THIS UNTIL IT STICKS TO YOUR BRAIN." Because it's just not going to stick, otherwise.
I had a moment of blinding rage during our quiz on Friday, when she refused to repeat the words in the listening/dictation portion, after going through all of them quickly, and speaking them at a conversational speed. She actually looked surprised when we asked her to repeat them, and only after polling the class to see how many people needed to hear them again (all of us) did she finally relent- but she warned us that she wasn't going to keep coddling us like this in the future first.
If I were taking the class for the first time, I would be in absolute despair, I think. I also feel that ridicule is a tool of limited use in an elementary language class; were the classroom environment less casual and cordial (due in large part to the awesomeness of my fellow classmates), things could get quite toxic rather quickly. (It's not so much that the instructor is cruel- she's just extraordinarily blunt, and finds our mistakes hilarious. Given that I'm in a constant state of barely controlled nervous laughter most of the time, I suppose I can't really fault her there.)
And yet! I'm still enjoying the class, but I do have a number of hugely unfair advantages. I'm certain I could have tested out of Elementary 1 with no problem, and possibly Elementary 2 with a decent effort, but that would have left me seriously struggling with speaking/listening in Intermediate. I know my own limitations; I don't learn languages very well independently, and the intensive format of summer session classes works well for me.
*"I like camel!" To be fair, the guy I was doing the dialogue with had brought in a picture of himself and a camel that day, so it's not like this was totally out of context. Even so, it was kind of a moment of epic fail on my part.