School Starts!! First week of classes!

Indeed. You are once again not reading the title of this blog post wrong. I’m once again in school, during the summer. It seems I just cannot do without school, and I’ve even managed to find a school in the oldest city of the world, Damascus. :) Just kidding. The point of my coming here was to speak Arabic and take classes, so elhamdulillah, the point is being accomplished insha’allah.

I walked to school this morning and arrived in about 35-40 minutes. After looking on the board for my name (Fatima Zulfikar—have I mentioned already that my name has become Fatima here? People have a hard time saying my name here as well, so I just went with Fatima. In Arabic: فاطمة ذوالفقار) and finding that I will be in room B-10, I walked over to my classroom. Classes here start at 9 and end at 1, meaning I have four hours of Arabic class through the day, with 10 minute breaks in between each hour. Quite fun. I calculated with my dad later in the week (I’m writing this post over the weekend of my second week here)that due to the 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, I’m actually doing the same amount of Arabic that I’ve done over the past three years at UNC, in one month. For a lot cheaper, by the way.

There are now 14 people in my class, 3 boys and 11 girls, plus the teacher, whose name is Ahmad Muhammad Muhammad, or, as he said, “in English, Ahmad Muhammad Double.” You have to hear him say the word “double” though, it’s not the same as it is in America. Or if anything you just have to wait until you see me or talk to me again to hear me saying it. :)

On the first day of class we did some really basic grammar, sort of like a re-cap of the basics of Arabic grammar where we went over the concepts of noun, verb, and what can be termed prepositions (خروف جر). Actually before that we introduced ourselves and things like that, and then we did the introduction to grammar.

Throughout the two weeks of school up to now, we went over numbers (عدادmore complicated than you would think actually—there are different rules for different numbers, as in the thing that is being counted changes according to the number, and the gender of the number also changes depending on the gender of the noun. It’s quite wonderful.) and repetition for emphasis (توكيد) and then also the part of a sentence that answers the questions of “how?” (الحال) and, most awesomely, we also went over the meanings of verb forms in Arabic. You see, in Arabic, you have this system where out of three letters, or the root, you can make a million different kinds of words depending on what form you put it in—this goes for verbs, which have 10 forms, called وزن plural اوزان, as well as nouns and adjectives and adverbs. The connections within the language are amazing, and you can pretty much make out the meaning of any word if you can find the three-letter root of that word.

So school is from Sunday to Thursday, and the weekend hits you kind of unexpectedly, especially since I’m still getting used to the fact that the week is indeed from Sunday to Thursday, and the weekend is Friday and Saturday. The feeling of happiness that washes over a person when they realize that the next day, Friday, is the start of the weekend, is exactly the same.

My weekend was pretty awesome so that deserves a post of its own, so the adventures of my second weekend here coming up!