I’ve been taking Arabic at this place in San Francisco for almost two years now. For 8 of those months, I wasn’t working so I always had my homework done and vocabulary memorized for the one or two days a week I had class.

Yeah, I was *that* person.

Things were different once I started working again. As I yawned in class one evening after my first day back at work, the teacher laughed good-naturedly and said that now I knew what it felt like. It just got harder from there. I didn’t have as much as the vocabulary memorized. Sometimes I didn’t even finish my homework. I won’t even talk about the last term…

For a moment I thought about taking a break, collect myself and start back up in a couple of months. Then I thought back to why I’m doing this all on the first place. I want to learn Arabic to eventually gain a better understanding of the Qur’an, to jump start my mind in the way that learning a language can, and also to get a reprieve from the corporate life.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for my job and I’m glad I have this opportunity to work and help out at home. It also pays for these classes! However, the 9 to 5 shouldn’t discourage me from pursuing outside interests but instead, enable me to do so.

This is something I want to do. It took me years to even start up classes. This isn’t the time to take a break, it’s time to start anew, the time to step it up. I’m going to make this work, InshAllah.

But man oh man is Arabic hard…

Previously, I wrote about taking my first Arabic class at Pacific Arabic Resources in SF. After I finished this first class, Introduction to Arabic, I moved on to Modern Standard Arabic 1, the next class in the series. Today was the last day of MSA 1 and I’m moving onto MSA 2, which starts in two weeks.

Learning Arabic has always been one of those things that I always wanted to do but never really got around to. It’s something that is best learned in an immersive environment – the most ideal way to learn Arabic is to move to an Arabic speaking country for a while and take classes there. However, I’ve never had the opportunity to do something like that and as obligations increase, chances of doing something along those lines gets slimmer and slimmer. I finally realized that learning it little by little is better than nothing and in this manner I can still attend to my responsibilities, which is why I finally decided to enroll in classes.

A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in class, going over homework with everyone else when it hit me: One day I will know Arabic well. I got so excited at that thought. It was just such an amazing feeling that I will one day actually achieve a goal I’ve had for myself for quite a while. I have a ways to go*, but InshAllah I’ll get there. I must now exude patience…

*Pacific Arabic Resources has classes all the way up to MSA 8 so you can imagine how much further I have to go.

So I had my first Arabic class this week at the Pacific Arabic Institute in San Francisco. I found out about this place from a google search- I don’t know anyone who has taken a class from them. Even though it seemed like a respectable institution based off of the website, I half-expected an empty plot of land where the building was supposed to be with a note that said “Haha fooled you! And now we have your money!” [Please note: This note would have had to be read in a sing-song voice for it to have the proper impact.]

Anyways, turns out this place does exist and there actually was a class. The instructor seems cool and the fact that the Kimchi Ninja is taking the class with me makes it all the more fun.

The cool (hmm… I already used cool. Neat?) part about this particular class was that because PAR does not have any kind of political or religious affiliation, it was filled with a diverse group of people who wanted to learn Arabic for all sorts of reasons.

I’m really looking forward to future sessions. From the taste of Arabic I got from the first class, I can’t wait to learn more.