Well obviously I speak English as my native language
and I speak comfortably
French and Greek
and fairly comfortably
I also speak Italian,
Hebrew,
Turkish,
Spanish.
مرحبا الى غرفتي
…which is “welcome to my room.”
So that’s like welcome to my crib, but in Arabic.
So I have a map of the world
which would be دنيا .
Pictures of my friends which would be
صداقتي
which would be “my friends”
and أسرتي
which would be “my family.”
There’s millions of people who speak the Arabic language
and I think that by doing my part
and understanding the language,
I’m on a track and a journey to understand them.
Language learning has had a profound impact on my life.
Languages were what made it possible for me
to become a successful academic in the humanities,
to do research, to get a job.
It’s made me be inclined to say “yes”
to possibilities of going places
or living in different places.
Ok, chapter two.
There’s so much vocab that we have to
learn at any given point.
Just in this one chapter alone
there’s about three pages worth.
The quickest way for me to understand it
is just to write the word down,
sound it out, drill it over and over again.
I remember vividly my early days in Greek.
I took a year off in the middle of college
and worked as a waitress at a small…
"restaurant” may be too swanky a term…
at a taverna in a little village in Crete.
I remember not knowing what the word aυτό meant.
And it means “that.”
And everybody kept saying “this…that…this, that”
and the other and they kept saying this word aυτό, aυτό, aυτό.
I had no idea what it was and once I figured it out…
wow, that was a huge key to all sorts of things.
نحن هنا في منطقة
Brooklyn.
And in English that means
“we are here in the Brooklyn area.”
And a lot of the words are in Arabic
so hopefully I’m going to be able to translate some of them.
And we’re going to see how this goes.
I can’t make out every word but the first word,
this one...
مطعم
is “restaurant”
and that’s حلالا,
so “halal,” like halal food.
I don’t know the word in the middle though.
Trying to see if I can make out any of this.
Unfortunately not.
This is a ه ...ج ...ر...
Oh…هجرة.
Oh my gosh that means “migration.”
Oh, so he might be an immigration lawyer.
“Immigration services,” something like that.
هجرة.
Oh I’m so glad I made that out. Ok, that’s so fun.
Next semester I’m actually going to NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus,
which is super exciting.
I’ll be able to fully immerse myself in the language.
I’ll be learning it in the morning in class
but then I have the rest of the day to myself.
So I’ll usually be able to maybe
get groceries off campus or want to go shopping in a market.
I’ll have to really use what I’ve learned in class.
We talk about life-long learning all the time…
languages are the ultimate
subject area for life-long learning.
Spending time thinking about language by learning another language
opens up all of those
thoughts and considerations to you,
and infinitely enriches
your mental map.