Keys in my Pocket

صباح الخير

And that would be a good morning to you in Arabic, minus all the vowel markings. Transliterated in the Classical Arabic, it sounds like: sabāhu-l-khayri.
In case you were wondering, I am at best in the midst of a short intensive Arabic course, getting my feet wet so that the dive into the depths of university courses this fall will not come as such a shock! After merely a few days of lessons, I am already swamped with homework, but I certainly know more now than I did when I began! That is always the payoff of language classes: you leave with more knowledge in your pocket!

It is exciting to learn a new language, as if a whole new world is suddenly before you--the language being the key that unlocks that door to new perspectives, customs, books, people, and experiences that until now have been impossible to communicate clearly in the original version! Of course, I am aware that this learning will take years, but bring it on, I say! Bring on the endless exercises, the bad pronunciation, the frustration of new concepts, the mistakes, the broken conversations in my head, the repetition--which will all one day hopefully result in a competent level of fluency!