The school is on the fifth floor of this building, next door to the University of Jordan and a ten minute walk from our apartment.
Four of us are here from the College of Charleston: Isadora (Izzy), Mike and I are all at the same level having had one year of Arabic. (I'm not counting my earlier attempt.) The three of us will be in a class by ourselves and then there's William, who has had two years of the language and already speaks it quite well. His studies will concentrate on learning street Arabic, which is quite different, apparently, from classical Arabic.
School started on Sunday. That first day - well, the three of us discovered we were not as smart as we thought we were and we certainly didn't know as much Arabic as we had hoped. In fact, we were pretty hopeless.
Our teacher gave us a short news article to translate and we managed to translate the words for 'in' and 'America' and that's about all. Turned out it was an article about a strike in Turkey. Who knew?
At that point our teacher said "excuse me," and left the classroom - off to find the director, we were sure, to question our presence at the school.
Apparently that first day was designed to evaluate our level of knowledge in order to design the rest of the program for our needs.
It worked - we're getting better.We can now say marhaba (hello) with decent enough pronunciation that the word is recognized as being an Arabic one. That first day, we tried out our rudimentary Arabic and the response was often "I don't understand English." That was a downer.
Classes are four hours (four long hours) five days a week. We have two teachers who split the time. Both of them are beautiful young Jordanian women.
Tahani is not used to speaking English as she generally teaches advanced Arabic and only speaks Arabic in the classroom. Mina, the other teacher, has studied English, speaks it with ease and uses many idiomatic expressions.
They both wear a hijab - the head covering which is more than just the scarf worn by many in Afghanistan - it completely covers the hair. They also wear long skirts, dresses or slacks and tops that cover their arms. Shoes are usually flats. Their clothes are color-coordinated, stylish and the effect is quite stunning. Most of the other teachers at the school dress similarly; one teacher however wears sneakers.
Today is Thursday and we're off for two days. Plans are to go out tonight. Tomorrow we are taking a day trip North to some ruins near the Syrian/Israeli border. Golan Heights area I hear. Scary.
Four of us are here from the College of Charleston: Isadora (Izzy), Mike and I are all at the same level having had one year of Arabic. (I'm not counting my earlier attempt.) The three of us will be in a class by ourselves and then there's William, who has had two years of the language and already speaks it quite well. His studies will concentrate on learning street Arabic, which is quite different, apparently, from classical Arabic.
School started on Sunday. That first day - well, the three of us discovered we were not as smart as we thought we were and we certainly didn't know as much Arabic as we had hoped. In fact, we were pretty hopeless.
Our teacher gave us a short news article to translate and we managed to translate the words for 'in' and 'America' and that's about all. Turned out it was an article about a strike in Turkey. Who knew?
At that point our teacher said "excuse me," and left the classroom - off to find the director, we were sure, to question our presence at the school.
Apparently that first day was designed to evaluate our level of knowledge in order to design the rest of the program for our needs.
It worked - we're getting better.We can now say marhaba (hello) with decent enough pronunciation that the word is recognized as being an Arabic one. That first day, we tried out our rudimentary Arabic and the response was often "I don't understand English." That was a downer.
Classes are four hours (four long hours) five days a week. We have two teachers who split the time. Both of them are beautiful young Jordanian women.
Tahani is not used to speaking English as she generally teaches advanced Arabic and only speaks Arabic in the classroom. Mina, the other teacher, has studied English, speaks it with ease and uses many idiomatic expressions.
They both wear a hijab - the head covering which is more than just the scarf worn by many in Afghanistan - it completely covers the hair. They also wear long skirts, dresses or slacks and tops that cover their arms. Shoes are usually flats. Their clothes are color-coordinated, stylish and the effect is quite stunning. Most of the other teachers at the school dress similarly; one teacher however wears sneakers.
Today is Thursday and we're off for two days. Plans are to go out tonight. Tomorrow we are taking a day trip North to some ruins near the Syrian/Israeli border. Golan Heights area I hear. Scary.
Be safe. I'm looking forward to hearing about your day trip.
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