Ahlan wa Sahlan

Welcome to my newly created blog...

Currently I am a student at the University of Washington and am planning on traveling to Sana'a Yemen to study Arabic at the Sana'a Institute for the Arabic Language. I plan on using this blog to provide information about my preparation and hopefully will update it regularly while there in order to keep family and friends up to date on my activities, as well as providing an insight to others interested in studying in Yemen, as there is a serious lack of resources about this topic.

A little more info about my experience, I started studying Arabic in September 2005, although I originally began studying the Middle East in general in Spring 2003 while in community college, eventually deciding to major in Comparative Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations after I transferred to the University of Washington September 2004. I have experience studying Japanese (1-Year College Level) and Italian when I studied abroad in Florence, Italy during Spring Quarter of 2004, (which was an amazing experience), so I do have a little background in learning languages--even though I have forgot most of the other two. Back to Arabic, for 1st Year we had a class of around 20 people with a graduate student teacher from Jordan who wasn't too bad, I guess. Then this summer I enrolled in Intermediate Second Year Arabic, which attempts to cover what would normally be 9 months of material in just 9 weeks, with class for 3 and half hours every morning. The professor is Libyan and is a really good teacher, as he is actually trained to teach unlike grad students, and our class only has 7 people. The class is definitely intense and very demanding, but hopefully this will provide me with a solid foundation before I go to Yemen...

More to come soon...