Alex Begins Learning Arabic (Week 0)

Hello all!

This is my "language learning" blog that I created with the purpose of letting other people who are also trying to learn a language to see the struggles that I go through as I try to learn some of the "most difficult languages in the world". My hope is that you can see that it doesn't matter how much you struggle, as long as you make an effort, you can progress in your goals.

First, a little bit about how I've come to where I am:

In high school, I took four years of Spanish but never got much better than saying "Hola, Como Estas?" About the best thing I could come up with was "No hablo espanol" because it got the point I needed across pretty quickly.

So last year I set myself a goal to learn Mandarin Chinese as I felt that in ten years having a foreign language would almost be a requirement. When I began, I felt that I wouldn't be able to "use" the language successfully until about five years in. After using different learning softwares, classes, and just reading a bunch of stuff, I finally said "screw it" and tried to see what would happen if I just tried to use it with people.

That was December of 2015. Since then, I have been able to use my Chinese in places wasn't expecting to use it (metro, ski slope, HomeAway, etc.) I now skype with a friend who lives in China once a week and this past spring I worked with a few graduate students from China with their English pronunciation while they helped me with my Chinese.

To say learning a language has changed my perception on things is an understatement. I hope you can find some enjoyment through my struggles to keep learning, or to begin learning a language if you haven't started.

I'll share some stories I've encountered along the way, but for now I will leave you with a video (which I hope to do each week). All my videos will be done in one take with no script so that you can see the struggles and watch me try to think on my feet. Next week I will give speaking Arabic a try for the first time ever!

I said the wrong thing for "next week" as it should have been "xia zhou" not "xia tian" (summer).