A Few Things Before I Leave

Well, I will be leaving for the airport in about 6 hours... Leaving the house at 3:30am, with my flight leaving at 7:30. Got a nearly 4 hour flight to Chicago, then a 3 hour layover. Then about an 8 hour flight to London where I arrive at about 6am local time. Then I am hoping to meet up with a few of my relatives in London that morning... Supposed to meet them on Baker Street in front of Madame Tussauds Wax Museum. We'll see how that goes... Then after a 16 hour layover in London I fly via Emirates Airlines to Dubai, where I chose to layover for about 24 hours to meet my friend from UW's English as a Second Language program, Abdulla, who will show me around all over, I hope. Then I fly out of Dubai the morning of the 9th, and arrive in Sana'a after a couple hour flight. At the Sana'a airport I am supposed to be met by representative of the school, Osman, who will have the original copy of my visa (they emailed me a scan of the document a few days ago) and will escort me to the school/housing.

A few days ago I met up with Gary (check out his blog) who recently returned from 5 months studying at CALES in Sanaa. We met at Starbucks in Seattle for at least 2and half hours, and he gave me lots of valuable info. I think it's really great to be able to talk to people who have studied in Yemen, because there is such a lack of resources about studying in this country. However, this seems to be changing as there are a number of blogs on the topic. Here are a few to look into if you are interested:

Gary (linked above) from Seattle who studied at CALES for 5 months

http://mkohlmeier.blogspot.com/
Mike from Omaha who studied this summer at CALES

http://arabicstudent.blogspot.com/
Ben who recently arrived to study and work at YLC

http://isaacc7.livejournal.com/
Isaac will be studying at CALES in October

http://www.xanga.com/mdkuehl/
Will be working at YLC for 2 years

http://polyglotpoetry.blogspot.com/
A Student at YLC, I believe

http://followkim.blogspot.com
Kim from Seattle area and teaching English at MALI for two years while also learning Arabic

"English Tom's" Blog, traveled to Yemen in October 2005

Janet taught English with AMIDEAST in 2005, I believe

Becky of Arabia studied for a little bit at CALES

There are some more blogs I know, but that is all I have links to at this moement.

Got to get back to packing... More when I arrive.

Airline Tickets

I actually bought my tickets awhile ago, but I initially had a lot of problems finding a reasonably priced ticket to Yemen, so I thought I would write a little about it. For me, I found that buying two separate tickets for the trip ended up saving me a couple hundred dollars compared to buying one full ticket. So I ended up buying a Seattle-Chicago-London ticket through Kayak.com (which is the coolest airfare search online) and then a London-Dubai-Sana'a ticket from Emirates Airlines. Buying directly from Emirates saved a few dollars, but they also had more flight options, and I elected to take a flight with a 24-hr layover in Dubai for about $30 more than a short connection because I will be able to meet up with my friend Abdullah who is studying English here at UW and will be returning to visit family between quarters. So hopefully he will be able to show me around to all the big sights and scenes in Dubai, and I am really looking forward to visiting it. Also with the two separate tickets situation it allows you to coordinate long visits at the intermediate city if you should so choose. However you do run the risk of having part of a flight delayed and then running into problems arriving in time for your other ticket, which I am hoping to avoid by allowing loooong layovers in London. But hopefully the flights will go smoothly, no luggage will be lost, and the SIAL staff will be waiting for me at the airport.

Maps of Sana'a

I wanted to test out Picasa's BlogThis! feature, so I thought I'd throw up a few maps of Sana'a which I discovered while searching high and low for them, including attempting to search for maps in French, German, Italian, and Arabic. There truly aren't very many good maps of Sana'a available online that I have been able to find. But here are the best of the them. I know the Lonely Planet series guidebooks have some decent maps street maps for most of the larger cities in Yemen, and even mark out the major Arabic schools in Sana'a. If you utilize these maps, with Lonely Planet, and even Google Maps satellite imagery, you should be able to get a pretty good feel of the area before you arrive. At least, that's what I am hoping to be true...

Arabic Resources

Just wanted to post some general Arabic resources to help anyone who is looking for new materials to work with:

Download Arabic Cartoons and Arabic Films using torrent software (I recommend uTorrent)... Great way to get authentic materials, particularly the cartoons which are in Modern Standard Arabic, or some of the many movies from Egyptian cinema if you are working on understanding spoken Arabic. As for the cartoons/children's programs, I particularly recommend the shows Iftah Ya Simsim (Arabic Sesame Street in MSA) and Hekayat Alameya, which has short animated stories from almost every culture, and are particularly helpful becuase they primarily consist of narration along with small sections of dialoge (in MSA).

In my classes at the University of Washington we use the Al-Kitaab fii Tallum Al-Arabiyya series of books like many other universities, and one of the favorite ways to get in extra study time is to burn all the audio from the DVDs (primarily the example sentences and stories, and listening excercises) included with the books (or if any other books include DVDs) using a program such as DVD Audio Extractor (which was free at one point) and then loading all the files into iTunes and onto my iPod, which allows me to listen while I walk to class, while I work, or wherever I am. Furthermore, my listening abilities aren't excellent at this point, so sometimes I slow down the playback speed to increase my comprehension, and then re-listen at a normal rate, or even faster. You can do this quickly and easily with a program like Audacity (free). Or with iPods you can turn the files into Audiobooks which allow variable speed playback at the touch of a button, although it is a little more work.

I also use a great flashcard program on the computer called VTrain, which is probably the best flashcard program out there. It schedules how often you review each card, for example you get Card X right, then you won't be quizzed on it until 1 day later, if you get it right again then in 2 more days, then after 4, 8, 16, 32, so forth... So it continually refreshes your memory and if you can't get it correct it starts all the way at the beginning again. You can advance the cards far enough so you only review them once in two months, or once a year, etc. Check it out, it has many more great features and they are continually improving it. The only pain is inputting all your vocabulary lists. It costs $19, but I think it is very well worth it in order to keep from losing your vocabulary over time...

A few book resources which I think are pretty good which I just kind of stumbled across and which aren't as widely known as the big name Arabic textbooks. One is Business Arabic Intermediate by Raji M Rammuny, and also Business Arabic Advanced (no beginners book). I've looked through this book and it seems well put together and complete with a story following a man who obtained a job in Saudi Arabia. Another one is Let's Read Arabic Newspapers by Howard D. Rowland, which has about 100 actual Arabic newspaper articles, with comprehension questions in Arabic, key vocabulary words/phrases not found in the Hans Wehr Dictionary and at the end of the book a translation of each article and answer key.

More specifically if you are planning on traveling to study in Yemen, there are a few good resources (which are important regardless if you want to speak Yemeni Arabic, because you still want to be able to understand what they are saying). Firstly there is Sbahtu! A Course in Sana'ani Arabic by Janet C.E. Watson which serves as a nice intro to the Sana'ani dialect with realistic situations based on theme. Another book by the same author is Wasf Sanaa: Texts in Sana'ani Arabic, which has extended texts (and the English translation) taken from actual dialogues about many different cultural aspects. And finally another book by Janet C.E. Watson is Social Issues in Popular Yemeni Culture, which features excerpts from a popular Yemeni radio show (and the English translation of course) which obviously deals with social issues but also with references to popular sayings, poetry and and religious sayings, with dialogue, debate and arguments between the two main characters. She also has another book on Syntax of Sana'ani Arabic although I haven't actually looked at. But, all of these books seem relatively hard to get ahold of, so I recommend using a local library and their Interlibrary Loan service (which is how I get ALL of my books). However the best part about these books is that you can easily acquire the accompanying audio in MP3 format (transcribed in the book) online in order to really develop your ear for Sana'ani Arabic, which is what I am attempting to do.

More to come.