Yesterday commenced with a two hour crash course on عامية (amiya), or colloquial, Arabic to help us out a bit with the whole not knowing how to speak Jordanian thing. I don't know why I was surprised, but like learning fusHa, pretty much every two minutes Ustaadh Muhammed gave us a piece of new information that was crazy overwhelming. For example: In Jordanian, the letter ق is not pronounced as such. Instead of its original sound, it is pronounced similar to an alif or a hard jim. So basically an entirely different noise, completely changing how many of the words I know are pronounced. Lovely. We moved on to learning entirely new subject pronouns (although some of them, like أنا, stay the same) and all of the new question words. There was a lot of new vocabulary, the most helpful being taxi related- although it would have been more helpful to have learned that two days ago so we could have employed words like عداد (meter) in that morning in order to get to campus.
There was then a completely useless 2 hour "intercultural reflection" in which we read some useless article, had some useless discussion, and did some useless exercises. The point of it was to try to make us more conscious of how we engaged with the community here during our program.. which was a confusing message to me, seeing as they then sent us on a ridiculous scavenger hunt that sent very conspicuous groups of students scurrying all around the neighborhood to complete the "challenges", running into shops without buying things and just generally being very overwhelmingly touristy. I was not a fan. My group humored the exercise for a while- which I'm actually thankful for, because we found a little copy and print center with this wonderful guy who was so sweet and nice despite not speaking any English. Thea and I engaged in rudimentary conversation with him- which, seeing as al-Kitaab doesn't see it fit to teach us any useful vocabulary, made it difficult- and he offered to print something, FOR FREE, for us. Honestly, the people here are so wonderful and hospitable. Like one of the girls on the program said, they should place the term Minnesota nice with Jordanian nice. Everyone (mostly) is very welcoming and friendly, and honestly, coming off of spending forever in Seattle where it's a miracle if someone says hello to you, it is quite refreshing.
The day rounded up with a horrible shopping excursion that lasted far too long and was marred by a terrible taxi driver (That's a whole 'nother post that will be happening. Dear lord.) that dumped me at home around 8. The point of the trip was to get food, so that at least happened, but I was exhausted and kind of in favor for crawling into bed and hiding from the world. Unfortunately this thing called the placement exam was tomorrow (aka today, aka the 3 hour exam of death and despair aforementioned in the title) and I thought I should study for it. Or at least freshen up on Arabic, or something. After dinner Thea and I "studied" together, which ended up to be staring blankly at my books, which then turned into just talking when Derek popped in. So instead of studying we ended up chatting until pretty late, which was fun- its really great to have a bunch of students in these apartments, it's kind of like a dorm except the housing is a million times nicer. The downside was that I had wanted to crawl into bed and hide from the world at 8, so I was definitely all hands on deck for turning in by the time it ticked past twelve. Luckily, we were all of the same mind.
So yeah. This morning was the 3 Hour Exam of Death and Despair, followed by a 10 minute Oral Proficiency Interview, and it was pretty much the worst exam I have ever encountered. I thought my Arabic finals last year were overwhelming (especially that damn second quarter one, goodness) but those were a cakewalk compared to this behemoth. It started with 5 reading passages- the first one was, joy of all joys, Maha! So it started off well. I could rattle off Maha's life story in my sleep. Things devolved quickly after that, progressing from very doable to holy shit I don't recognize any of these words. So that was exciting. The exam is meant to be a placement test for everyone from 1 semester to 3 years of Arabic, so you aren't meant to be able to answer all or even most of the questions depending on your level, but it was still super overwhelming to have a run of 15 questions that you couldn't even understand, let alone answer. Listening was no better, grammar was marginally okay, vocabulary was just a crap shoot, and the second composition- translating a letter into Arabic- was nightmare inducing. Oh, plus the whole this is a three hour exam that you actually don't even finish in three hours thing.
They gave us an hour break for lunch before our OPIs, so I grabbed lunch with a bunch of people, lamented about my current state of brain mush, and then made my way back to campus. They gave us our class schedules before the OPIs, in case we needed to switch anything around.. which I did. They had given me both of my top choices, which unfortunately were scheduled for the same days and times, and therefore impossible to concurrently take. I had signed up for them as my first and second choices, as one of them was a seminar with only 13 spots, thinking that they'd place me into whichever one had room left and then fill the next class slot with one of my other choices. Nope. So I had to make the heartbreaking decision to drop the seminar in favor of something else and I'm still not really over it yet.
I was the last of my group to do my OPI, given the schedule finagling I had to do, but it actually went really well. The blank staring was definitely kept to a minimum, the only thing I didn't really have the vocabulary to talk about was what my dad did- al-Kitaab may have had some eclectic vocabulary words but astronomer wasn't one of them- and I managed to make the professor interviewing me laugh once. In a good way. I hope.
And now I am collapsed on the couch. I've been here for an hour. I'll likely be here for at least a few more. Then maybe, just maybe, I'll think about doing something other than being slowly absorbed by couch cushions.
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