Talking With Myself (Arabic Week 7)

Got a microphone which should help when recording live conversations with people!

This past week I had another person reach out to me asking about any tips I can offer for getting through a learning rut where progress doesn't seem to be coming. Everybody is pressed for time. It is all about being efficient with that time to make it beneficial. You have to ask yourself what you are trying to do with the language you are learning. For example, my goal is to be able to talk to people with the languages I learn. I'm not too concerned about being able to write Chinese so I've stopped dedicating time to writing characters. It also wasn't beneficial because there is not a lot of correlation between the characters and the phonetic pronunciation of the words. Now as I am learning Arabic, it is more phonetically related between the written and spoken word so I will try to learn more on how to write. So how do I approach this with my learning? I talk to myself in Chinese A LOT. I talk to myself driving home from work, while cooking food, while doing dishes, just today when I walked into the grocery store and saw bananas I instantly said "xiang jiao" to remind myself. Not only does this allow me to practice at times when I am not focused on studying but this really helps with becoming comfortable speaking. It also does help to make it less of an "I am studying" mindset and allowing it to become part of your everyday life. This comfort that I've obtained allowed me to have a conversation in Chinese while driving home one of the graduate students that I work with each week. We talked in Chinese about whether they want a car and how I got my car. The big thing about the conversation was that it was at night during a rainstorm and I was still able to listen and speak while trying to navigate using her GPS (which was also in Chinese). The more you break away from the idea of "studying" and form more into the mindset of allowing it to be part of your everyday life it will then become easier to work with.

New words in Arabic.

Going along with this idea, my video this week is.....me talking to myself! At first I was like, "You should talk to yourself in both Arabic and Chinese!" but I realized that the conversation would fall flat pretty quick due to my differing levels. Instead I pretending to be two different people who are just meeting and speaking Arabic. It's short and sweet but it allows me to prepare the phrases I will say and ask when I meet somebody. This is great because  you can see me completely forget a few words and have to remember them. During this I was staring off as I tried to remember each phrase.

Until next time.