Languages

Looking back over my three years of college, there isn't much that stands out classwise. There have certainly been a few classes I've really enjoyed (History of Globalization, Meaning of America and Civil Liberties, jump to the forefront,) but overall I feel like I've largely forgotten much of what I've learned. Yes, I'm sure much of it there is still buried in the dingy stacks of my mind, and with a certain amount of effort could be recalled, but it's also likely that I won't need much of this information barring an obscure jeopardy question or trivial pursuit game.

The biggest theme to my college academic career is that there is no thematic order in my classes. For example were I a bio or engineering major my classes would logically build on each other, so that instead of having shallow knowledge in many areas I would have extensive knowledge in one area (which is still in itself exceeding broad, (and my knowledge relative to experts in that field, would still be exceeding shallow, but that's a whole other topic.) Now I have no one to blame for this course of events but myself. I like taking diverse classes, that was and is the appeal to college for me; being able to take classes that have nothing to do with each other for the sole reason of their appeal to you. But looking back from a slightly more mature standpoint than I had when I entered this school it occurs to me that I could have been served in creating a more logical academic program for myself, since I can always read about other topics I am interested in. ON the other hand, I do think that I have gained non-tangible benefits from these classes (I have been able to form my thoughts more coherently, I have a less naive worldview, I am able to be more critical and analytical of ideas,) but these can be frustrating when you don't see evidence of these improvements on a daily basis. Whereas if I were an engineering major I could point to a problem I can now solve, which I once could not. However, the one tangible benefit I have gotten out of academic college is the acquisition of languages. Prior to entering college I had been ambivalent about languages. I always loved geography and learning about other cultures, so on that level languages always appealed to me. But Spanish was always hard, I was bad at speaking and listening to it and though I took it all throughout high school I didn't sign up for it in my first semester of college, because I believed I knew it well enough to get by, and that was enough.

Second semester of college I decided I was going to be an IR major, which required 8 semesters of a language. So I manned up, signed up for Spanish 4 and found it, in an extremely surprising first day to be ridiculously easy. Unfortunately, a lot of the time when things are easy for me, my effort starts slacking. So I coasted through Spanish 4, and then Spanish 21 and 22, getting A-/B+, doing the minimum amount of homework possible and cramming and then forgetting vocab. (As a sidenote, the fact that Spanish 4-22 was easy for me should not be surprising, really my AP spanish in high school should have prepared me for 22 at the least, and it was only because I did poorly on the placement test that I started out so low.) I finished 22 at the end of my sophomore year, which is a pretty odd time for self-analysis. You're halfway through your college career, by definition probably haven't accomplished very much, the job threat is too far away for it to be anything, but an abstraction in your mind, and yet at the same time you really have to decide what major you're going to focus on, and what, if anything, you might want to accomplish after college. I had assumed from the start that I was going to go abroad, but none of the Spanish-speaking countries really appealed to me. I wanted to be somewhere that was the center of the action, but at the same time wanted to escape going to Europe, because I wanted to be somewhere that would push me outside my comfort zone a little bit. I had always been interested in the Middle East and while browsing abroad options there, Cairo stood out as a possible destination. Center of the action? Yes. Adventure? Definitely yes. The only problem was that I didn't know any Arabic, but as it happened Tufts was offering a first-time experimental summer course for Arabic 1-2 in 6 weeks.

I made the decision one day in March. I remember it because it was one of the first warm days of the beginning of spring. I had skipped class and walked down to Porter Square Bookstore, in order to buy the Lonely Planet Egypt guide and apply for a job (no dice.) I stopped back at the Powderhouse Park to browse through the guide and kill the hour or so I had before my workout. After thirty minutes of looking through the guide, I had already made up my mind."Fuck it, I'm going," I thought, and that was that. Coincidentally or not, I ran one of the best workouts of my track career that day, which convinced me of the idea that workout and race performance is at least partially tied to life-confidence levels.

Three months later I started Arabic, and I tried harder in the beginning than I have in almost anything else in my life. There are few things more fun than the beginning of learning a new language, before the frustration of the plateau sets in, and every day you can understand exponentially more and more. Of course as the class wore on, I tried less. It's tough to keep up the same enthusiasm you feel in the beginning for something new over a long period of time, and the time constraints of running and working were definitely taking a toll.

Another three months later school started again. I was taking both Arabic and Spanish, which created some confusions, especially in prepositions (it's odd what the brain will confuse and what it doesn't.) But the more I learned about Arabic the more it enthralled me. There's an elegant logic to the Arabic language that's missing in both English and Spanish. So while it doesn't sound as beautiful as Spanish, at least to my ear, it achieves more beauty in its logical perfection. Almost every word is based off a three letter root. There are 10s or even 100s of patterns which you can perform with a root in order to change the meaning. For example the word qaara means to decide or to settle. But the word istaqara means to decide to settle down in a place because the form ista+root means to seek something. This creates infinite poetic possibilities. Furthermore because of the languages intimate connection with the Koran, words take on a preciseness lacking in English (of course in everyday colloquial language they lose this preciseness.) For example the words raja'a and 'aada both mean to return. Yet technically in the Koran, raja'a means to return to God after death, or in other words returning to your original and ultimate destination, while 'aada means to return to dust after death, or returning to an impermanent destination. So in fusha (formal arabic) raja'a can mean returning back home, or somewhere you will stay, or 'aada means to return to a temporary destination. There's something in this order and preciseness that really appeals to me. The library's closing now, which means I have to go, but I'll finish on this entry (though I forget what exactly I was trying to say when I started writing it) soon hopefully.