Oh boy!  Studying has taken over my life these past couple of weeks.  We are flying through the textbook, and I’m trying my best to keep up.

Right now I’m hanging out in the mafraj of our college doing some Arabic homework, and decided I needed a break from studying.  This writing project hangs in the back of my head every day I’m not working on a piece.

A Spanish student is explaining a complicated Arabic language concept to his friend in Italian. He asks me a question in English, and I try to respond in Spanish, but I end up saying half in Arabic. The category of “foreign language” in my brain seems to just blend when I try to recall something before Arabic. Je suis طالب جديد و nací en el estado de Illinois.  Sometimes when talking in Arabic, Spanish words flow out of my mouth.  Like it’s somehow better to use a foreign word, so long as I don’t use English.  One American student practices his German with a German, and two others their French with some Italians.  To my one side is a Serbian-born who grew up in Norway.  He knows six languages.  The Arab teenager next to me is little comfort, because I now understand the complexity of the one language he speaks.

The Spaniard across from mespeaks his native Spanish, plus Catalan, English, Italian, French, Portuguese, Arabic, and, “A little German.” He just graduated college. I sit for five minutes trying to get a word and its plural cemented in my brain, take a break, and ask him how he does it. “Do you make flash cards?” Sometimes flashcards help, sometimes he just writes out lists and looks at them a lot; obviously you should use a new word as soon as you learn it, but the most important thing, he tells me, is to have passion for learning the language.

I’m trying to figure out what passion means. If I were passionate about this word, would it come to me easier? Is passion an action? Do the passionate flip flash cards every moment they’re not doing something else?

My motivation, and maybe this is my passion (?), is partially borne of necessity, I think. First is the obvious. If I want to buy the chocolate milk instead of the regular, sure, I can point to it, but it’s much easier when I can speak it. The same goes for my work in the office. I need scissors and I need tape and I need to print something from your color printer, and I want to ask you politely, so I’m going to look up those words, write them down, say them to you, have you fix what I said, and then get my work done. I’ll probably end up doing a lot of pointing and gesturing anyway.

This passion borne of necessity is not just getting stuff done, though. I believe it’s an act of becoming. With my Arabic-speaking friends, I feel like a fraction of a person. All my thoughts, opinions, convictions, ideas, the intangibles that make “me”, are stuck in my head, in another language. Maybe some people like having a cloud of mystery surrounding themselves, but if you know me, you know that I talk, a Lot, so living inside this box of a language barrier is not ideal, not who I am. Thus with every new word I learn, every phrase I own, and I am becoming more “me”.  This desire to become whole is a passion in itself, I think, and I’m trying to figure out the best actions to support it.

I make flashcards, and I make lists.  I take my $.75 dinner in a local restaurant, and practice what I know with the locals.  I study hours a day, writing and re-writing words on the page, hoping the mechanical repetition will trickle up my arm and into my brain.  The vocabulary is extensive, and the concepts do not translate.  I cannot “take a nap” or “have a blast”.  I have to shift my conceptual understanding of the world to fit the language; trying to have the language fit my understanding gets me nowhere.

The Australian next to me in the office listens to Arabic music every day. The word “my love”, as in, “you are my love, my one and only”, drifts from the speakers at a rate of forty per minute. So I have that word down pat. Earlier today he was listening to Osama, for purely educational purposes, of course. One could call my co-worker a passionate learner.  He’s been here for a year and a half, and knows his best plan of attack.

I’ve been thinking that way lately, both because of its difficulty and my pace in the classroom.  From here on out, I am no longer studying Arabic.  I am attacking it.