Trying to translate the words 'carbon footprint' using a dictionary from 1979

Classes at the University of Damascus started yesterday… and I have certainly learned at least one valuable lesson already. Children, listen closely. Do not make jokes about how funny it would be if you guessed all the right answers on a test and got put in a very advanced class, and certainly do not follow that up by saying you don’t mind what level you are in as long as you’re not the only one. On the bus ride into the university yesterday morning various Edinburgh students were rehashing the test, and of all the question they mentioned I hadn’t got a single one right - so imagine my surprise when I arrived at the university and checked the groups, numbered A-F only to find I couldn’t see my name on either of the two lists with the rest of the Edinburgh students. Eventually I worked my way right to the end of the line, only to see my name at the start of the list for the most advanced group, followed by 14 students from SOAS, and one other isolated guy from St. Andrews!

When I got to the classroom there were two rows of desks, so I went to the back with Jonathan, the lone St. Andrews student, and the other English speaking SOAS students filled the rest of the back row. In the front row sat 5 girls wearing the hijab, and two very Middle Eastern looking guys, and three of them started to casually chat in fluent Arabic while waiting for the teacher to arrive. When he did he read out the register, and then proceeded to speak at us for a solid hour in very fast Arabic. I understood very little of what he told us, but did get the gist of the main points I think, in between alternately panicking and wondering if someone was playing a practical joke on me. When he started telling us that we’d be studying literature in Arabic and that ‘failure is forbidden’, I wondered if perhaps my result was based more on lucky guesses than any real skill, and when he told us that if he heard us use a word of English we had to pay a fine I decided I’d give it a week before asking to move down a class. When he gave us a text to summarise on the spot in Arabic, of which I understood only two words in the whole first paragraph, I decided perhaps two days was more like it, and when he told us that each week one of us would have to do a 10 minute presentation entirely in Arabic, followed by a 50 minute discussion and announced that ‘the first person to present will be India, this Sunday’, I approached him in the break and asked to move down a class!

The rest of the Edinburgh students are in the two groups below the top, and I’m pretty sure that if it wasn’t for a few two many lucky guesses on my part I’d be in a lower group too… It sounds like it would be more suited to my Arabic level and I definitely feel like in the group I’m in currently I am the stupid one who doesn’t know as much as everybody else. That said I spoke to the other students about it and they all encouraged me to give it a go and said they’d help me, and they all know we have a lot less teaching hours than they do. The main problem for me is not wanting be shown up in front of the class, which is stupid as no one is judging anybody, so I should probably just swallow my pride and try my best even if I am at a slightly lower level than the others. I went back to the same advanced class today, as my teacher told me I had to attend but could move down a class next week. Having spent last night struggling to translate the ridiculously difficult text he had given us about climate change and environmental damage and strain on natural resources, I felt sick this morning because I was so nervous about having to talk about it in Arabic, although I am realising that some of the other English speaking SOAS students are finding it difficult too, and that they also struggled with that text. As it happened we had a new teacher today, a really lovely friendly man, who also spoke entirely in Arabic, but who made an effort to check that everybody was following him, not just the fluent speakers in the front row. The text he gave us to study was much easier, a story about a mosque in Turkey where a shadow of a man praying appeared above the door everyday, and he went through it slowly, explaining all the difficult words in Arabic until everybody understood and then asked us to write a summary in Arabic without looking at the text, and I realised I had learnt a lot of new vocabulary without even realising it. It was pretty satisfying, so I think I’ll give it a week, and see how it goes before I decide whether to move down a class or not. After all I can always move down a level, but it’s a lot harder to move up. I’m not sure whether I’ll learn more if I really stretch myself, even if I don’t understand everything, or whether it would be better to be in an easier class and learn more thoroughly so I don’t end up with gaps in my knowledge. The good thing about the advanced class is we study colloquial Arabic and literature as well as MSA, but the downside is the presentation. That said it would definitely be good for my Arabic to have to write a whole long presentation and learn vocabulary for a discussion, and the good thing about being the worst in the class is that I have no expectations to live up to!

Other than that Becka and I have been shopping for sandals which we bought from a lovely man who customised them to fit our feet perfectly, and gave clubbing with the Edinburgh, SOAS and St. Andrews students a miss in favour of sitting on a roof terrace by the Umayyad mosque and eating fruit and laughing a lot and talking in stupid accents til one in the morning. Tomorrow is homework day for me, and Saturday we are thinking of going to Krak des Chavaliers. In the meantime I have been talking lots of pictures of doors for a friend’s art project, so will put some of them up for general consumption.

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