I’ve been learning Arabic for most of this year in preparation for next year’s trip through the Middle East and it’s been an experience, to say the least. I learned German for a few years in high school and did an intensive crash course in advance of spending two months in Austria in 2002, achieving a reasonable level of fluency that allowed me to live in a non-English speaking village without problems, but Arabic has been a much greater challenge.

I don’t think I’m one of those people who learn languages very naturally since I’m a hopeless aural learner, relying instead on memorising how language looks when written down. I don’t have a good memory for vocabulary but can understand grammar rules and sentence structure with relative ease. In contrast, my girlfriend is learning French for the trip (for our time in North Africa) and she soaks up vocabulary like a sponge. I hate her.

Since I’ve had to learn an entirely new script, written in the wrong direction and with a whole bunch of weird rules that govern the characters’ joining, I’ve felt lost for most of the year as others in the class more easily recall the way that words sound. But in the last few weeks things have started to “click” and I’ve had that lovely feeling of achievement that comes after a long struggle to get your head around something difficult.

All of a sudden I can fluently read unfamiliar words without having to decode each letter one-by-one; I may not know what the word means but I can say it. Most importantly, the vocabulary that I’ve needed to learn so far (greetings, personal questions, numbers, location, directions, shopping words) is starting to appear in my head like a photograph, exactly as it does when I speak English or (my basic) German. I see the word, written in Arabic. I’m feeling pretty bloody proud of myself.

I know that by the time I head off overseas my ability to converse with native Arabic speakers will be extremely limited, but I think my ability to make a not completely ridiculous effort will go a long way. Importantly, I’ll be able to read signs, menus, timetables and anything else fairly easily with the aid of an English-Arabic pocket dictionary.

I’ve always had as one of my goals the ability to speak a foreign language fluently, and I’ve always thought that this language would be German since I already have a decent head start, but now I’m thinking that I’ll continue with formal Arabic studies after I return home.

What language learning experiences have youse guys had?