Arabic Progress Week 1 - Setting Some Goals

So it has officially been a week since I started trying to learn another language.

One of the big challenges that people face when learning a language is goal setting. When I first started getting serious about learning Chinese I set some goals for the year:

1. Have a 15 minute conversation using ONLY Chinese.
2. Be able to speak a 5 minute monologue in Chinese.

I was able to meet the first goal within 6 months so now I've added two NEW goals to try to reach by the end of the year:

1. Have a 15 minute conversation using ONLY Chinese.
2. Be able to speak a 5 minute monologue in Chinese.
3. Have a 40 minute conversation using ONLY Chinese.
4. Have a 15 minute conversation with somebody who DOESN'T speak any English.

The last one is going to be REALLY interesting. I'll make a whole post about that experience later. For now, I need to set some goals that I can use for both my languages that I am learning. This is my new UPDATED goals for the year!

1. Have a 15 minute conversation using ONLY Chinese.
2. Be able to speak a 5 minute monologue in Chinese.
3. Have a 40 minute conversation using ONLY Chinese.
4. Have a 15 minute conversation with somebody who DOESN'T speak any English.
5. Watch an episode of a Chinese TV show and be able to understand what is happening.
6. Be able to read and pronounce a full page of Arabic whether I know the words or not.
7. Have a 30 minute conversation with somebody that is a mix of Arabic/English
8. Listen to an Arabic song and be able to explain it in Chinese

We will see how it goes in the upcoming months. Here is an update on how my first week of Arabic went:

Learning to write from right to left is taking some adjustment.

Things started out pretty well. I was able to learn to write the letters as I learned their pronunciation. I wanted to start by learning the alphabet as it is a phonetic language whereas Chinese is not, unless you refer to pinyin. Some of the letters are still difficult ("th" is different than "th"?!) but I know that I won't sound perfect in a week.  The goal is to make progress along the way!

I hit a rut on about the third day. I took on too much an suddenly my head was spinning. Luckily, I was able to talk to a friend of mine who has been studying Arabic for years and helped me with the pronunciation of the letters from an English stand point.

My big focus is on learning the words I will use in my life. In the video this week, I prepared words about myself (I learned brother but not sister for that reason). As I need to say and understand more things, I can learn more vocabulary but learning the specific words that I will need has proven to be really helpful in the past.

My videos are done in one take, without reading a script. My goal is that this will show me struggle, as I did twice in this one, as I try to remember the words I want. Nobody is perfect but the importance is on trying to communicate. Whether somebody's grammar is perfect if they came up to you and said, "Me.....bathroom......where?" You would understand pretty well what they're looking for. This is the mentality that I am trying to approach this with. Anyways, here is the video.

Even listening to the video I can see words that I've mispronounced. Better on day 7 than day 0 though!

Next week I will hopefully be able to upload a video earlier in the week where I will explain in Chinese what I will be doing for the next week and a half!