I’m actually not writing to complain. I’m finding the challenge of Arabic quite enjoyable right now. But yes, it’s hard. It’s hard to stretch yourself to try new things, whether it’s a new language or another skill. But that certainly doesn’t mean you should never try.
I’ve been working through Genesis, as I mentioned last week. But Tuesday I began working on another book, Harry Potter. I am finding the different writing styles of the printers (okay, one is *technically* not a “printer” since it’s a digital format) a little challenging, as it’s like reading different people’s writing. So once you get past the font differences, it’s no big deal.
My biggest issue with decoding Harry Potter is actually the way that it was translated in the first place. I love these books, and I can’t really explain why I’m not liking the translation, but I feel like it’s missing something. It feels a bit cold, clinical. I just started reading it, so perhaps it will get better, but I am not feeling the same as I did learning the Bible verses.
I’ve seen some crossover words, and a lot of really common words. I’ve also seen some things that interest me in other ways, because there are words that are seemingly related, but then I realize that they actually have little in common except common letters. It’s sort of like sorting out English homonyms and word families, and realizing what fits and what doesn’t is an interesting challenge.
I have a husband who cares little for cracking open the Arabic language and studying grammar and such, so while he’s good at speaking and translating, he isn’t about to give me a lesson in conjugating verbs. Even so, he’s helped me when I ask a specific question about the form of a word, he is pretty helpful, to a point. I’m not out to criticize him, but he’s more of a guide than a teacher, so I’m having to fill in a lot of blanks, and then have him come in and check my work (a checker, perhaps?). I’ve made some mistakes with where to put the dots, whether loops go over or under the line on lined paper, and that darn little “s” looking thing that sounds like the “e” in egg. My phone doesn’t give me that letter as an option, which has started to tick me off when I’m trying to use it for translating. I get a totally random word that means nothing to the text instead of the word I actually meant.
Of course, I’m not saying all this to frighten you away. Maybe you’ve been wanting to learn a language, or you are in the middle of studying one. Well, I just want to say that I know how you’re feeling when you get annoyed and want to throw your study books out the window, or when your teacher has told you for the 1000th time, “it’s pronounced like this, not like that.”
Also, the small victories feel really good. When you start being able to think of words without searching your brain, when you know what a word on the page means and you aren’t translating it from the English, those kinds of things. Each small victory may come after a short learning period or a long one, but they still come if you work toward them.
Anything worth doing is going to take work. If it’s not earned, it doesn’t have the same rewards.
