That's The Way al-Lughah al-Arabiyyah Crumbles

Assalamualaykum wht,

Salman al-Ani is my current Arabic instructor, where I meet him twice a week, every Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Alhamdulillah, luckily IU offers Arabic classes (which you can major in), and Spring 2005 would be my last semester with this outstanding course in it.

Majority of the students are Americans, Malaysians, and once in a while you will find some Saudis - native Arabic speakers taking an Arabic class just for the sake of boosting their grade. Some of my American classmates took Arabic classes because they wanted to be an FBI agent, some...due to the condition where their spouses speak Arabic, while others have their own interesting personal reasons.

The reason why I take those Arabic classes can be simplified by understanding my inner perplexing psychology. I guess I miss the good old days, remembering Arabic words and phrases, analyzing the sentences with mansub, marfu' or majrur, and making up sentences with my limited vocabularies. Learning the language of the Quran sure has its own sweetness. I can understand why one of my friends was depressed when he was exempted from taking the Arabic classes in UIA.

Let's get back to Prof Salaman, shall we?. I always love his method of teaching; he has this idiosyncratic technique, which made us love him because the material is easily understood with him teaching it. Particularly, I can say that ALL Arabic teachers are practicing this technique. To comprehend this technique that I was talking about, you surely have to take at least 2 Arabic classes to feel the flow of this kind of teaching.

However, Prof Salman al-Ani has become one of my favorite teachers today. He informed us last week that we were going to have a test on Monday. He gave us 7 questions, and later on he kindly gave us all the answers to all the questions. He pointed that 2 of the questions would be mandatory, and 1 of the reminder would be chosen by us by using 'his' inimitable way. On the exam day, a chosen student representative would close his/her eyes while randomly points his/her finger to a sheet of paper where all the questions were listed. Nick had the honor to make the selection, and he accidentally chose number 4, the hardest of all. Since Prof. Salman also thought the question was a hard one, he announced that we would have an open-book exam. At the end of the session, we all leaved the classroom feeling extremely exultant.

posted by Hana' at 3/29/2005 03:45:00 AM |