Arabic Fluency, Testing, Comprehension

    It feels like it has been many years since I alighted on the studies. I was learning the letters, the words, (some of the words). But there are always more, and many times they seem incomprehensible. They get manipulated and the brain does not compute, like math story problems or scientific formulas or chemistty or physics. Sometimes concepts of signal technology or computer code.

    Rocket science and Arabic. Can be mutually frustrating.

    I learned a few words in 1992, wanting to be conversant or fluent. Learning the letters did not come easy the first few months. But by the following year, a region beyond my native midwest, into the intermountains of North America, I was showing them to others. Their names transliterated, they could see how to spell Brian or Chris or Karen of Jill.

    I was doing the homework for the end of semester in 1993, my second Arabic class, and things seemed doable.

    A year later I was writing, or trying to write, words, phrases, sentences. But my poor teachers slogged through my scribbings and would question what is was I was composing.

    I had words in my brain, but many of them were misspelled and wrong. In 1994. I had some limited conversations in Arabic, even with a Palestinian, which excited me.

    Understanding could always be a problem.

    Years and years pass. Some things are forgotten, others confused and seemingly maligned.

    That is not the right word.

    I listend and sometimes talk, but the comprehension can be missing.

    In songs, for sure, but that happens in my native English and my better Spanish.

    Arabic gets hard, to test in like I have done over the years. Frustrating, like math formulas, word problems, chemistry concepts or chemical compositions. Formulas? Combinations?

    Arabic can be difficult and formulaic, and then hard to recognize. 

    With the sods and seens, the ayns and the aliphs. Plurals or measures of a verb, or even the prepositions get all tangle up and mangled.

    The brain of one does not compute as some do.

    The math gets twisted.

    We mess up in English, too. It gets pidgin and creole, I guess. But we push on.

    So Modern Standard Arabic is clearer, and then all the dialects make it more confusing. All the countries and the local expressions.

    Permutations of the same things, or sometimes completely different. Happens in Spanish, too.

    There we are.