i spent most of my undergraduate career focused on the Middle East, and wrote an entire honors thesis on it (again, thank you Xanax for your many blessings, like keeping me sane in my attempts to produce 70 pages on the intellectual history of islamism). however, through some odd twist, it was possible for me to have that be my focus and French be my language.
now that i have been working at the carter center and realizing more and more that i do wanna stay focused on the Middle East, i figured that having a working knowledge of arabic would raise my level of usefulness in that area from what it is now, which is pretty much next to nothing. i could have enrolled in a class through the carter center, but they are further along than i am since when i began this endeavor, i had yet to even have a working knowledge of the alphabet. i could have also taken night classes, but i seriously value my evenings of doing yoga and watching law and order.
so i decided it would be a good idea to teach myself arabic. i found myself some book on amazon, which has actually been quite useful. and, i recently gathered a bunch of arabic movies so i am able to try and match the script im learning to sounds, because i realized when someone tried to speak arabic to me that i had no ability to speak.
however, pretty often, i stop and wonder what i actually think that i'm doing. only ridiculously smart people teach themselves languages, and its probably going to take me like 5 years minimum to actually do it, but i'm on a path to become more useful to the world than i currently am.. wish me luck?
MKD
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