While I have brought up many important and (I hope) entertaining subjects thus far, I feel that I have left out one very important aspect of my stay so far: learning Arabic. Having come into Jordan with no experience with the language at all, I was certainly a bit skeptical about how I would fare in such circumstances; however, my first month has shown me that not knowing a country’s foreign language should never dissuade somebody from traveling to another foreign country. In addition, I am much farther ahead in my learning Arabic than I ever would have thought before I left.
Listed in the State Department’s top level of difficulty, Arabic is certainly not an easy language to pick up, but the same goes for learning really any language. Plain and simple, the key to learning it is just practice and proper instruction. Having Arabic classes for three hours a day and five days per week takes care of the proper instruction and the simple act of living in Jordan allows me to practice my Arabic as much as I want whether I am reading signs around Amman as ride I in a taxi or whether I am trying to engage in conversations with my host family; although, the biggest effect that living in Jordan has had on my ability to learn the language is the way that being here has given me extra motivation to practice as I am putting a much greater effort into learning this language than I have with any other language that I have taken so far in my life.
For instance, I study vocabulary in my room for one and a half to two hours every night. Incentive and extra time are the two biggest reasons that my stay in Jordan has given me an extra motivation to practice as I need to understand the language to be able to immerse myself in the culture as much as I want to and as I simply have a lot less distractions than I would if I were at my home university. My first month in Jordan has really shown that living in a foreign country enables a person to learn even new and very difficult languages quickly and quite effectively.
Of all my experiences up to this point in Jordan, being to able read Arabic script and being able to begin to understand and to speak the language are probably the ones that excite me the most.
