Do you ever feel like you’re drinking from a firehose?
You are thirsty and gingerly guide your lips to the stream of water, but you can’t even get them wet for fear of your teeth getting knocked out by the forceful stream. Meanwhile, all that water you’re not getting down, flows out and floods the place.
That’s a bit what it’s been like these past three weeks for Ricardo and me.
Actually, fire hydrant works better here than firehose, but that would be two words and, as you’ve probably noticed, I like to contain the reflection with one word.
There are two weeks left of our five week intensive and it feels like a miracle that we are still afloat (or at least have our noses above water).
We graduated from beginner’s and started our elementary Arabic book on Friday—the one that opens from right to left and lacks the glossy pages and color pictures of our old book. The instructions are mostly in Arabic and the tables have long lists of verbs.
Our teacher reminded us that, “this is an intensive and you signed up for it…”
True.
We then learned how to conjugate the five families of weak verbs (in the present tense) and went through the 26 verbs for the current lesson.
I’m still not sure how I’m going to keep memorizing last week’s verbs and learn these by Tuesday.
Remember the compost reflection from last week?
I’m finding great rest in just doing my best and trusting that the words that don’t make it to the “readily-available-for-conversation-shelf” will find some kind of a landing spot in my brain that helps me grow in a general way towards being able to function in this wonderful and difficult new language.
Whatever your challenge, may you rest even as you work and sweat—knowing that good will come out of it all.
And may your rest be sweet.
Alicia