Learning two languages at once

I'm super excited because I have my next steps for language learning in place!

When I lived here before, I knew I was only going to be here for a year. I came with every intention of learning Arabic, but was quickly rebuffed by a lot of people who said it wasn't worth trying to learn arabic if I was only going to here for a year. Those warnings combined with the fact that the french teacher at the school was a lot better than the Arabic teacher and that French was pretty easy to overlay on my Spanish, and I basically just learned enough Arabic for basic daily tasks: shopping, greetings, and making people laugh. My French got pretty good, but that was 12 years ago and even then I was not even close to fluent.

So, now we're back! 

I decided before we got here, that I wanted to at least learn how to read Arabic. So I bought some preschool-ish workbooks for me and Ez and got to work. I also downloaded a few apps so I could hear how the letters sound. Most letters have an equivalent in English, but a few are completely foreign sounds. Being able to hear them over and over on the little kid apps was a big help.

Then I took it to the next level with an amazing book that helped me learn how to put the letters together. All Arabic is written in cursive and the letters usually look different if they're at the beginning, middle or end of a word. A missed flight to Qatar gave me time in the first class lounge to go through this book and by the end of the day I was reading a lot of words!

This book is amazing! After a few hours, I read all the words on page 58 without cheating!

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Now we're settling into Rabat and I am ready to jump into formal language learning. Here are a few of the factors playing into my decision about how to tackle this:

- Moroccan Arabic ('Darija') is what most people speak here but it is unrecognizeable to most Arabic speakers in the rest of the world. With Morocco being so far away from Arabia (it was a 9 hour flight to Oman), Darija has shifted quite a bit away from its roots and incorporated a lot of French and Spanish. Also, when people talk here it's like Spanglish, except with French and Arabic. People drift back and forth between the two pretty fluidly, at least in the big cities. All that to say, what I learn of Moroccan Arabic isn't totally transferrable to the rest of the Arab-speaking world ... mostly just to Algeria. 

- That said, as a foreigner, people will default to speaking to me in French. Cory speaks Darija, but doesn't speak French. Everyone still keeps speaking to him in French, even when he's clearly confused and only responds in Arabic. I think it's because Moroccans have a lot of languages in their brains, and they're not used to foreigners speaking Arabic. So the foreigner audience has the French slot in their brains. We had a taxi driver yesterday that took about 5 minutes to realize that Cory was only speaking to him in Darija and then he switched over too. So, Darija won't mostly be necessary for me to speak, more to understand what's going on around me and on the occassions when I'm talking to an older person who doesn't speak French.

- There's more and more of an emphasis on English now. The minister of somehing came out a few weeks ago and said university courses should be in English and a lot of young people in the cities speak English. I could pretty easily get by with English and the amounts of French and Darija that I already know. 

- But relationally and professionally, the closer to fluency I can become in both languages, the more opportunities I will have to serve. And I have the extra time to spend and I love learning languages, so I'm going for it!

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I was checking out the language learning landscape here and sorting through my options this week. 

There are 3 approaches: learn on the street, take classes, or get a private tutor. Learning on the street is great, but I like to be a little more structured and aggressive about it. Classes and tutoring have both been great for me in the past, depending on the quality of each. When I lived here before, there was hardly any formal curriculum available for learning Darija, so everyone HAD to get a private tutor, but now there are a few language centers that teach it. And there are plenty of centers that teach French. 

Darija:

I am at a pretty low level so I wanted to start out with some good structure with class instruction. This took some hunting, but there's a language center that has intensive classes that start on Monday! I'll be taking 2-4 hours of classes per day. I'm starting with two weeks to make sure I like it, but there are a lot more classes i can take if it's a good fit.

If I prefer to go the tutoring route after these classes, I have a couple of leads on good tutors that I could try.

French: 

I thought this would be the easy one because we live just a few blocks from the French cultural institute and they have reasonably-priced classes that start every quarter. But then I heard/read a few things that said their classes aren't very well done. So I decided to go the tutor route with French. A woman posted on a Rabat forum on FB about how much she loves her tutor so I called her tutor up and we are set to start classes in the middle of December (after I am finished with the first roundof  intensive Darija classes so I don't fry my brain too much).

I also connected with someone who lives in my neighborhood, who is interested in being a conversation partner with me. She wants to practice her English and can help me practice my French. So we'll probably swap days - one time we meet we speak only in English and the next time only in French. We're planning to meet up on Saturday to talk through how it would work best. I'm excited to meet her.

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My hope is that the time and money spent in language lessons pay off big time. I love connecting with new people and it's a lot easier to connect when I know what they're saying!