Arabic at Dartmouth

Though I feel that most of my time at Dartmouth is devoted to the extracurriculars I'm involved in and social development, there's no escaping the fact that academics are way up there when it comes to important aspects of my education. And so, at the beginning of the fall term, it seems appropriate for me to talk about the classes I'm taking.

If you read my entry about the D-Plan, you know that Dartmouth students typically take three classes per term. This term, I am taking Arabic 1, Government 58 (International Political Economy), and Astronomy 3 (exploring the Universe, with lab). In this entry I'm going to talk a bit about Arabic.

First of all, I guess I should explain why I've decided to take Arabic my senior year. Basically, it's the result of a small chain of decisions. After having studied in France, I really wanted to take another language here. But I figured that if I really wanted to learn a romance language like Spanish or Italian (or even continue with French), I could pretty much do that on my own (provided, of course, I put the time in). If I were to devote three courses my senior year to a new language, it should probably be one that didn't use the Latin alphabet and thus, I assume, would be harder to learn on one's own. So that left Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Of those, Chinese and Arabic seemed the most attractive to me, and since I've taken a few classes on the Middle East and may in the near future end up working in that region for the State Department, I figured that I'm more likely to use Arabic in the next few years than Chinese. So that was that.

The language instruction program at Dartmouth is remarkably strong. Decades ago, Professor John Rassias invented a language teaching method (called - go figure - the Rassias method) that uses a unique combination of classroom instruction and language drill. The classroom portion is pretty straightforward; we meet from 9:00-9:50 am 5 days a week and it's pretty much what you'd expect from a language class. Drill, however, is pretty unique. It's led by a student who's fluent in the target language, and is based on a rapid-fire system of exchanges between the instructor and students. Right now we're just learning the alphabet and a few basic words, so it's pretty straightforward: the instructor says a word, we repeat it, and then she snaps and points at us individually to have us repeat the word by ourselves. As we begin to learn verb conjugations and things like that, it will become a bit more complicated. For example, when I took French, my instructor might say "être" (to be), then "je" (I), snap and point at himself, and say "J'ai été" (I was), indicating that he wanted us to conjugate the verb and put it in the passé composé. Then he might say "nous," snap and point at someone, and the student would have to respond "Nous avons été" (We were). (That's about what we did for the first couple days of French 2 - it got a lot more difficult after that). Importantly, the target language is spoken throughout the entire drill session; English is completely avoided.

What's nice about beginning a new language is that there's instant gratification built in and you can be very conscious of your own learning. Last week, something written in Arabic was a scribble. Today it is a sound. Next week it will be a word. It's really neat to have someone say a word and actually know how to write it in Arabic. Sure it's a lot of work, but being aware of your own progress is very encouraging.

My plan is to take Arabic 2 in the winter and 3 in the spring. Because it's such a difficult language, I know that I'll be somewhere between proficient and mildly conversational when I'm finished and will still have a lot of work in front of me if I really want to be able to use Arabic socially or professionally. But I'm confident that with the Rassias method, drill, and the quality of classroom instruction here, I'll be well on my way to having learned a whole new language. And to me, there are few things more exciting than that.