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Posts from the ‘Arabic’ Category

1
Feb

A Fresh Start

Hi there to all; newcomers as well as people putting up with me changing this once again!

I’ve been messing around with various blogging platforms for as long as I can remember; livejournal, wordpress, blogger, posterous etc. I think I’ve been through them all, however I have never got into a consistent habit of actually writing content.  Well I’m determined to change that this year and I’ve had a bit of an on-line service clear out.

I’ve decided to cut down what I’m using and put my content into two camps. Longer, composed posts on specific topics, and what I suppose I’ll call life blogging. WordPress has always been in my opinion the most fully featured and extensive system for the former, and I’ve finally decided that Tumblr works best for the latter.

For some time I was sure that Posterous was the perfect platform, however only supporting tags not categories really prevents it being useful for long posts and organising. Posterous also doesn’t have the same community drive that Tumblr has making it less useful for life blogging. The themes available, whilst becoming more numerous are not as slick as Tumblr either.

I think I got caught up in Posterous because of my slight OCD tendencies to sync and normalise data across different places. Basically the “auto posting everywhere” that Posterous can do made me obsess on maintaining so many different services and accounts, that eventually I’m thinking less about content and more about ironing out the auto posting quirks and errors.

Regarding the auto posting, I’ve realised that people only really care about Facebook and Twitter! So by coupling  Tumblr to fb and twitter, all my life and photo blogging bases are covered. WordPress can also be coupled to twitter and fb provides a more structured forum for longer subject composed posts on religion, atheism, scepticism, Arabic etc.

By letting go of my strange psychological need to use and understand every platform out there, I can try getting focussed on writing and posting more interesting stuff. And if I really need/want to, I can manually copy and paste between Tumblr and WordPress for the overlaps.

So, that’s it…I’m going to start making a concerted effort to post at least once a week here, and well I guess whenever the mood strikes for Tumblr.

David

26
Oct

New Arabic classes kicking my ass!

Hi all, update on my language learning.

During the summer I went on holiday to Tunisia and had a fantastic time practising Arabic, both spoken and written. Having it in front of me every day was a great way to force the mind from constant brute force translation, to a more fluid understanding the words in of themselves, without the needs to translate to English.

However after that I’ve ashamedly done very little until my course started back up at the Uni a few weeks ago. I’m now in my second year of the course but its the 3rd level, as I skipped the first one due to my previous study and experience. My results were great from last year, got a distinction with 77 out of a possible 80, so whilst I had been a little lazy through August and September the Tunisia trip and the last years results had me all excited about starting the classes again.

This year my group (level 3) have been mixed in with level 4, which is proving to be a little frustrating thus far. Everyone at level 3 i about the same ability I would say, but the people on level 4 are very mixed ability. Of course better than us as would be expected but because level 4 is the highest available there are some people with 7 or 8 years experience with diplomas, who are certainly way ahead. Whilst the teacher is doing her best to split and accommodate everybody, this is making the lessons quite fragmented to say the least.
It is a new teacher also, and we have yet to find the common ground where she knows our exact ability level, and we understand her methodology, and what it is she wants us to do. This isn’t helped by the fact that she had been given wrong information regarding which textbooks and materials we used last year, so a lot of what she had planned was very inappropriate for our tiny brains.
The difficulty level has just shot up exponentially too, the teacher speaks mostly in arabic, translating as we need it (which is a lot!) But whilst this is very taxing on the brain, it is very good practise, and this was one thing that we didn’t have last year that we could have benefitted from. I also think however that at the moment she thinks we should be a lot further ahead than we are, which is somewhat depressing.
Oh well, I’m not giving up! I do think that I’m getting the hang of it, gotta focus on the positives :) If anyone is in the leeds area that is fluent in Arabic and wants to improve their English i’m on the lookout for an Arabic Study Buddy so…get in touch!
dB
17
Apr

My Arabic progress to date

Hey,

I just thought I would share something that I’m quite proud of, it’s my first piece of written coursework for my Arabic class (click images for larger versions). I know it looks like gibberish (albeit beautiful gibberish in my opinion) but the great thing is that I really do understand what I’ve written. Now considering that I never did French, German or any other foreign language at school I’m really pleased.

For those of you that don’t know, I’ve been learning Arabic now for nearly 3 years, however it was only in September just gone that I started taking structured classes in it (@Leeds Met Uni). Prior to this I had been doing quite well studying alone and developed quite a large vocabulary,

but felt that I needed a bit more structure to get my head around the grammar. The nice thing was that because I had spent a lot of time at home working on the script and the alphabet and sounds I could go straight into the 2nd year class and skip much of what I had already learnt.

I am going to try and post frequently about my progress and

about the Arabic language in general

passing along any tips or resouces that I find useful.

mA’ salama

David
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