Language Learner's Journal: Homestay Edition

[This is a continuation of Taylor's blog series where she details some of the week-in-week-out lessons that she learns through her Arabic studies and coaching work together with me. For other posts in the series, click here.] 

My first time around with immersive language learning (studying for a semester in Brazil ten years ago), it was a no-brainer that I would do a homestay. I was a college student, I had no local networks to tap into to find housing, and forgoing a degree of privacy and independence felt not so different from the dorm life I was living the rest of the year. Furthermore, an employee of my school coordinated an apartment for me from the start, and back then I wasn’t as intentional, organized, and proactive about my learning as I am now.

By the time I got to Amman to bump up my Arabic studies last December, I only briefly considered doing a homestay. I wanted my own place or to at least live with other young people like me — I’d have guests visiting, I like to do yoga in my home, spend long times in the kitchen making vegetarian food and listening to podcasts, stay up late laughing with my mom on skype, etc. I also work part-time remotely each day, and I needed to make sure I’d have a quiet place appropriate for that.

About six months into studying, however, I started to think about a homestay seriously for the first time. I had a persistent feeling that my ability to read native texts and understand a newscast was beyond my ability to make small talk or say “Excuse me, I need to go brush my teeth.” 

I had a home in Amman and wasn’t going to force a homestay to happen, but I also began laying out feelers for families of all women interested in hosting a 30-year-old journalist. I had a happening Amman social life by half a year into my stay in the city, with morning yoga, friends who’d pick me up for running groups, dinner parties out, and meetings at coffee shops with my language partner. If I was going to stay with a family, it would ideally be one that understood my educational goals in Amman and how those various parts of my daily life fit into it.

I lucked out. A friend who coaches a track team broached the idea with a student who lives with her three sisters, parents and grandmother. The sisters range from kindergarten to college-aged and are a lively pack that zips around the city for their own activities each day, be it shopping, going to a sports team practice, or all the daughters going to the balad for a sisters meal out. Their home also had an open-door policy for all the neighbourhood youth, and throughout the day I’d have a smiley primary school girl telling me about the barbecue she ate the day before with her family or an Iraqi pharmaceutical student telling me about the farsi words he uses in dialect back home.  

Alex has emphasized to me the importance of speaking to a variety of people, since it can be deceptive to feel so confident speaking with language teachers and then, say, find groups of old people really challenging. The times when I was speaking with the grandmother of the family and the kindergarten daughter were indeed my hardest moments, but also fun, no-pressure ones Tayta usually wanted to know my whereabouts throughout the day and my travel plans. The little girl generally liked talking about her dog or the puppy show we saw in the circus together.

My favourite time of day was bedtime, when myself and the oldest and youngest daughter all went to bed together in the same room, chattering until we drifted off to sleep. I realized I had never needed to learn to say “Shall I turn off the light?” to anyone in all of my classes (بطفي الضوء؟)

I wish I had worked more with a notebook to write down new words and phrases I was hearing, but that house was full of life, and I floated between rooms and conversations and meals and situations throughout the day. Their conversations amongst themselves were often too fast for me, and sometimes I knew only the main outlines of what they were discussing and missed what specific point was funny or surprising. There was a huge difference between having a one-on-one conversation versus participating in the group chat – the former was a speaking exercise, whereas the latter was largely a listening one. I was once very lost in a conversation about food that involved peals of laughter until I recognized one word I knew (كبد) and realized they were talking about eating the internal organs of animals. 

Even if I hadn’t learned a single new word (thankfully, I did), it was a valuable booster shot to my confidence to be able to know that yes, I can live amongst a family and handle myself in day-to-day situations. I brought up basic things that I wanted to resolve in Amman with them, like explaining I wanted to find a quality and affordable dentist (they took me to a great one) and that I had Brazilian friends looking for an affordable way to send money abroad (hence many discussions about bank accounts and foreign currencies and a final group trip to MoneyGram). 

In the end, I stayed about two very happy weeks with them. I could always have done more toward a laser-focus goal of learning Arabic – I could have stayed with them from day one, I could have refused to speak with anyone in English all of my time in Amman, I could have lived in more remote parts of the country where I would be a rare foreigner. But one takeaway I have from my Brazil years is that, for me as a journalist, an immersive experience in a new place is a big-tent one: the gringos are part of it, the English-speaking locals with a foot abroad are a part of it, my bilingual running group and morning yoga are parts of it, the other language students working toward the same goals that I am are a part of it. The college-aged daughter who took me under the wing for my weeks in her home was about to study abroad in Germany, which I think is why she got my loosely defined “spend time with a family” goal so well. My next hope is that I’ll be able to open my doors to the sisters and offer them a home abroad someday.

Language Learner's Journal: Meaningful Leisure

[This is a continuation of Taylor's blog series where she details some of the week-in-week-out lessons that she learns through her Arabic studies and coaching work together with me. For other posts in the series, click here.] 

If the first phase of my Arabic study in Jordan was intensive textbook fusha and the second was track-switching ammiya classes, this third and current could be called meaningful leisure, or, hanging out around town a lot and making friends. 

When I went to Bombay for an extended stay in 2010, a journalism colleague gave me a piece of advice: "Take everyone up on their offer to hang out with you." It may sound "duh," but over the years living abroad, I've seen how foreigners spend their free time in ways that often diverge from how residents in a given city do so. When we, as gringos in Rio, may have wanted to go to foreign film festivals or paragilding over the beach, many of our Brazilian peers would be going to baby showers, a classmate's thesis defense, or Outback Steakhouse. All of those activities are great ones, and I think the spirit of my colleague's advice was: If you want to get to know a culture, let your host take the lead and show you how they spend their free time.

That means over the past few weeks, I've sat on the sidewalk in front of a gift shop with a delightful young sculptor and a store clerk, my partners in very unstructured language exchanges that break when one of them needs to pop into the shop to attend a client. I went for a 6:30 a.m. workout with two of the fastest runners in Amman, a pair of brothers I met at a sunset race in Wadi Rum as we waited in the dunes watching for headlamps of other runners finishing. I went to a capoeira performance at Jadal cafe that was held in commemoration of the nakba; I was pleased with how accessible the discussion after the performance was for me, particularly when an older man in the audience vigorously questioned the capoeristas as to why they needed to do someone else's sport when they could do dabke.

Alex often talks about "islands" of vocabulary, and I thought about that as I spent more time with the same people and can make good guesses about the words they're using. (As I crossed the finished line at the race, other runners asked me ايش كان مركزك؟ though I certainly hadn't run fast enough to place. It was satisfying, though, to deduce what they were saying.) The store clerk and I talk often about money and salaries, since she hustles to work two jobs to help her family out.

I could be more purist; I speak plenty of English in these interactions. I'm still searching for the point of equilibrium between taking advantage of each opportunity I get to speak in Arabic while (of course!) having genuine friendships with peers with whom I share interests (running, yoga, current events, feminism, vegetarianism, pets). Plenty of the vocabulary and references regarding those topics are in English, not to mention the people who are interested in them often read and speak in English about them. I don't believe every friendship needs to be instrumentalized for one's language-learning goals (though I believe even more strongly that such an attitude should not be a lofty cover for native English speakers kicking back and relaxing). When I told Alex about my happy sidewalk sessions, which qualify more as bilingual shooting-the-shit than a proper language exchange, he said: You're doing the real thing, rather than practicing for it.

Some working notes, now, on practice:

I've been happy with my second time around testing out language exchanges; I've used the website Conversation Exchange, which I had suspected could be out of use by its retro web design but is actually popping. I'm pretty strict about where I meet the person, i.e., it needs to be as quiet as possible (a first exchange at Indoor cafe across from the University of Jordan was really hard to decipher and, from my point of view, turned into disjointed monologues rather than a conversation because I couldn't hear her well).

I think the exchanges, for my current level, are less experimental zones and more consolidation ones. That is to say, I don't risk and try to reach for vocabulary I'm shaky on but work with what I know decently. That's why I like coupling the exchanges with private classes, which I go to twice a week and are a better place for reaching and experimenting. I also think that in a language exchange it is useful to ask my partner "is the way I said that correct?" but not productive to ask "why?" I save those questions for my teacher.

Alex encouraged me to discover certain transition phrases (على فكرة... على كل حال... بالرغم من) and put them into practice in my speech, which give the impression of being more fluent and conversant than I am. This has been a fun exercise with my private teacher, since I take the English phrases I want and try to describe to her a situation that I might use them.

I'm on board with the many lines of criticism telling us that we need to make an active effort to start unplugging our lives before we turn into cyborgs; that said, having a round of friends here I chat with on Facebook or Whatsapp has indeed been great practice for seeing spelled out how people are saying what I hear each day. In conversations, I still feel like I rarely could repeat back word-for-word what someone has said to me, even if I usually get the message through key words and context.

I bought Diwan Baladna, an ammiya vocabulary book organized by subject matter. I really like it – my hope is that it will help me turn a lot of passive vocabulary into active vocabulary. I have a quibble with the audio component (read too fast in long audio files that make it tedious to isolate the word I want. And having sample sentences is far better than English translations!).

And finally, as per Alex's encouragement, I continue to avoid dictionaries and translation apps. I make ample use of Reverso Context, but only after I've read a message or passage several times through, and usually I'm using it to confirm my guess of a word's meaning is true. Especially when it comes to Whatsapp and chatting, the majority of messages I am receiving are ones that involve words I know well (Want to meet at this time? How far did you run today? I have foul and rice my mom made, want some? It's veg.)

Language Learner's Journal: Independent Study

[This is a continuation of Taylor's blog series where she details some of the week-in-week-out lessons that she learns through her Arabic studies and coaching work together with me. For other posts in the series, click here.]

For some Arabic students (myself, certainly), when we first start to learn about the diglossia in Arabic, we feel somewhat cheated, like, "I signed up to learn a language, and now you're telling me that I need to learn some second, shadow language if I'm actually to use it?" It's like the rug is pulled out from beneath our feet, like we'd be studying Shakespeare and are frustrated to find that real people actually speak Singlish. Colleagues who work in journalism/research repeatedly encouraged me to study dialect, which led me to leave my last fusha course for an ammiya one at Sijal. 

Happily, it doesn't feel nearly so intimidating as I once imagined when I turned on some ammiya YouTube videos and despaired that a year in MSA classes seemed to do me no good. Indeed, the listening comprehension and vocabulary I learned at Qasid feels like a swiss army knife I now use to pick a new lock. Also, another useful tool from my MSA classes – an extreme comfort with not understanding many of the words I'm hearing but still staying engaged and hanging on for the ones I do.

On a related note, Alex has encouraged me to keep up independent reading even as I'm in a course that largely focuses on speaking and listening. That's another skill that I appreciate from my time at Qasid – the willingness to dive into a text, even when many of the words are ones I don't recognize, and look for the keys that will give me some clue about it. I'm a pen-and-paper learner, so I've been printing out media articles and reading them through twice, no dictionary, then underlining words I don't know and making my best guess at what they mean. 

For example, this week I read one in the Huffington Post about scientists questioning whether we need to drink eight cups of water a day. The piece mentioned drinking a sufficient amount of water so that "البول" is "واضح اللون أو خفيف الصفرة." I didn't know that first word, but I was delighted to know exactly what it was as soon as I read the rest of the sentence. I'm convinced that process of discovery is a powerful learning tool, more so than having translations readily at hand to answer our doubts as soon as we have them. 

Also, having a bit more free time, I've been able to take advantage of events going on around me to get extra-classroom contact with the language. I sat in on a Sunday morning lecture from an Al Jazeera filmmaker who produced an extraordinary documentary, "The Boy Who Started the Syrian War." His discussion afterwards was well above my level, and I only got the outlines of what he was saying, which is still far more than I would have gotten just three months ago when I came to Amman. It was still, of course, a very useful experience. For example, he used the word نظام always when I was expecting him to say حكومة, which led me to ask and confirm with my teacher that it seems to be used like we say "regime" in English, or, a disdainful/pejorative word for a government. 

Being someone who spends plenty of time in the kitchen (because organic vegetarian food doesn't make itself, at least not anywhere walking distance from me =) I'm a big podcast fan. Alex's on Jordanian ammiya is great listening for me at my current level – when I tried this just a few months ago, it was beyond my grasp. I also like the BBC Arabic service and DW's current events discussion panel. 

And repeating what I wrote in my last post – an upcoming post will be some reflections on accents and errors and embarrassment and the ways we as language learners judge ourselves (and others? I hope not. I indeed only judge myself when it comes to foreign language ability, which may point to, as Alex says, how much language is a confidence game). I'm on a scale between sheepish and chatterbox depending on what situation I'm in, and I've been chewing over what it is about a given situation that makes me feel either of those ways.

[To learn more about coaching with Alex, click here. To learn more about 'Master Arabic', a guide for intermediate-level Arabic students, click here.]

Language Learner's Journal: Leaving Qasid

[This is a continuation of Taylor's blog series where she details some of the week-in-week-out lessons that she learns through her Arabic studies and coaching work together with me. For other posts in the series, click here.]

After two-and-a-half intense months, I've finished my course at Qasid. Though this didn't always feel easy to see on a day-to-day basis, it's extraordinary how much students there learn over a short period of time. On my first day, I couldn't produce full sentences other than my go-to greetings and "I'm an American journalist in Brazil," and over the weeks there, comprehended and participated in discussions about women's rights, marriage customs in different cultures, literature, colonialism and occupation.

Even if it kicked my butt (or because it did), I leave with a great opinion of the school. Qasid's teachers are extremely well trained in how to instruct students in an immersive method – we only occasionally resorted to English words when, say, our teacher wanted to make sure we really understood a grammatical point at hand. My listening comprehension soared, as did my ability to read texts (each week's lesson in our textbook revolved around one or two native texts). Also, I had the great fortune of my class whittling down to only two students, which meant that for three hours each morning, my classmate and I were responsible for answering every question and participating fully in every discussion. So much opportunity to speak in a comfortable, mistakes-are-fine-and-expected environment turned me into something of a chatterbox, though my enthusiasm is several steps ahead of my accuracy.

Also, a delightful unexpected benefit about Qasid is that a group of students and teachers stay the afternoon there in their study halls. That meant that while I worked on my computer after class, I was often surrounded by chatter in Arabic, both teachers engaging their students in fusha and many students who were native dialect speakers chatting amongst themselves.

That said, after speaking with several other language students and journalist colleagues, consulting Alex, and thinking about my goals, I decided to switch tracks from my original plan to study two terms at Qasid and then move back to the U.S. for a summer language institute to instead focus on ammiya here in Amman. I work a part-time job to support my studies, while most Qasid students are full-time exchange students. If all students there were exhausted from their homework load, I was 150 percent so. Journalist after journalist tells me they wish they had better dialect skills and, not being someone who has a "good ear," i.e., I don't pick up much language without studying it in a methodical way, I think it will be important to focus on a dialect in a structured setting.

Still, I'd consider going to Qasid again in the future. In fact, I was part of a test group to try out a new study tool the are developing that would supply easy-to-access audio and videos to accompany texts and vocabulary we study in Qasid's textbooks. It looks like a promising way to bridge the gap between reading comprehension and pronunciation of the words in the text, i.e., I often recognize words in a text based on their consonants and long vowels but am mentally (and inappropriately) filling in a fatha each time I don't know the short vowels.

As for my next steps: I've enrolled in a twice-a-week ammiya course at Sijal and am already enamoured with the class. I tested into the advanced level, though the other students in the class are far ahead of me in dialect. That said, unlike with Qasid the first time around (when I asked to be placed down a level because I was having difficulty following the class), I felt comfortable sticking to this level since I indeed understand the majority of the lesson. I'll also be taking private lessons to complement the group course.

Another choice I've been happy with is that I've also moved to a far more happening place than my last home in Shmeisani, which has meant a world of difference in terms of just having daily interactions. I try to look up the words of things I'm looking for before I hit the streets (most recently, شمعة، سبانخ، و لوز بدون ملح). I find most people are very willing to speak with a foreigner in Arabic, though this sometimes involves my telling strangers who respond to me in English "بحكي الإنكليزية شيء، انا برازلية). I will reflect on the merits of this and some broader thoughts on expat language learning/daily usage in a future post.

I've also become a social media and technology ascetic, logging out of my accounts and using them only when something necessary is at hand. In addition to being an old soul who believes that technology is eating away at humanity and rewiring our brains like substance addiction, seeing the Facebook I see every day anywhere else in the world is not one of the reasons I came to Amman. It's pleasant to let my eyes wander while I sit in a taxi or service and try to speed read the signs around me before they're out of sight. I don't think I risk جهالة anytime soon – I read plenty of news (it's part of my job), but it's confined to a couple of hours of work a day, and then I'm free.

And as for that free time, another upcoming blog will be about independent study methods post-Qasid that I will develop with Alex to make sure I keep up the reading skills I learned there even as I switch into a dialect course.

Everything You Need to Study Jordanian Arabic

I've been living in Jordan for a little over four months, and I'm pleased to say that I seem to have converted what Syrian/Lebanese colloquial Arabic I learnt in the past into the Jordanian dialect.

Along the way, I've used various resources and watched various materials that have really helped. This blog post will be my review of what is available for the student of the Jordanian dialect.

Lots of people say that you can just choose 'Levantine' and that's enough. "You don't need to specialise any further than that," I've heard on a number of occasions. My experience is that the country-level distinctions between Jordanian, Syrian and Lebanese Arabic actually do matter, particularly once you get past the pure basics and want to have more natural conversations.

For various reasons, Jordanian dialect resources are under-represented in the market for books and audio resources. They're either subsumed under the 'Levantine' bracket or books generally tend to offer Syrian or Lebanese flavours. It is for this reason that I think it's worth taking stock and gathering together all the resources available for students hoping to travel to Jordan or make a study of the specific dialect spoken here.

Being the last somewhat-calm country in the non-Gulf non-north-African Arab-speaking world, it's a preferred destination for year-abroad students mid-university. If that's you, I think you'll find this post really useful.

How to Use These Resources

There are a lot of books and resources listed below. The expectation is not that you'll go through them all, but that you should rather be aware of what is out there. There aren't really many options for textbooks, so you're basically stuck with Hakini Arabi. (Good thing it's a well-designed course, with lots of dialogue and practice). I'd recommend the serious student of Jordanian Arabic get hold of both Tiedemann's 101 Verbs book and Diwan Baladna. Both are filled with material you'll find nowhere else. (See below for details on these books).

As for the rest, pick and choose: watch a comedy show; do some listening practice exercises; take an iTalki lesson with someone from Jordan. Those final steps are up to you, and depend a lot more on your goals and how fast you want to go.

If you'd like one-on-one mentoring/coaching in your journey to learn Jordanian dialect (and/or standard written Arabic), have a read of what I offer and get in touch with me.

For a one-stop-shop guide to improving your Arabic and getting beyond the intermediate level, particularly for students who've studied for a year or two already, read my new book, Master Arabic.

Grammar

• Jordanian Arabic Grammar: A Short Guide for Beginners (Peace Corps)

This is a useful overview of the main grammatical features of the language. The grammar covered is very basic, but it is nice to have it all in one place.

• CGE Jordan's Videos (YouTube)

CGE Jordan Institute for Arabic Studies have also published an indispensable book (see below), but these are their videos. They teach the kinds of things you'll never find in a book, and they also practice them in pairs. They also have material for intermediate and advanced students, like this video in which Fred teaches how to intensify your sentences:

If you learn best from watching videos and have the time to wade through hours and hours of short lessons, this is probably an excellent place to start. I spoke with the director of CGE, in many of the videos, for the premium edition of 'Master Arabic'.

Textbooks

• Hakini Arabi: Palestinian and Jordanian Colloquial for Beginners

This is your only option for a full textbook covering Jordanian dialect for beginners. It is taught as if you haven't necessarily studied any other Arabic before, so parts of it move a little slow, but that's a minor quibble. The book comes with a link to audio files that you download online, and these are essential for working through the dialogues and listening exercises. There are lots of group role-playing exercises suggested in the book, but even if you're studying on your own this is a valuable one-stop shop to work through.

Different parts of Jordan speak slightly different sub-dialects, and this book offers options for three varieties: 'Jordanian', 'Palestinian-Rural' and 'Jordanian and Palestinian-Urban'. For an idea of the kinds of materials contained within, here's an example of a vocabulary list from early on:

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and here's an example of a context/phrasal explainer from towards the end of the book:

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For a total beginner, I would certainly start with Hakini Arabi. One of the first things I did after moving to Amman was to go through this book.

• Living Arabic: A Comprehensive Introductory Course

Living Arabic is part of the Munther Younes Arabic-tuition empire. He generally produces solid materials and though I've never seen a copy of this book, I've been told by a number of students that it contains useful materials for Jordanian Arabic. The text teaches MSA alongside colloquial, so this may not be totally suited to your goals. Perhaps the best scenario for this is if you get a chance to use it in a library. You can probably work your way through the Jordanian Arabic sections in a few days/weeks.

Words and Sentences

• Diwan Baladna: The Unprecedented Spoken Arabic Dictionary

This is a thematic dictionary and phrasebook for Jordanian Arabic. I hesitated to buy this for a long time on account of its cover, but I saw it in a bookshop and the content is really excellent. It comes with an audio CD, though that is problematic since few computers come with CD readers; I hope the authors will make the data available for download as well in the near future.

The first part of the book is filled with expressions, phrases, phrase + answer combinations and other materials that you don't usually find, even in books specialising in colloquial readers. Here is an example of phrases that come with certain responses:

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and here are some expressions from their very rich selection, also showing the explanations and how the book makes them very easy to use/pick up:

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The rest of the book is filled with thematically-organised vocab lists (sorted into Arabic / translation / Arabic plural columns). It's useful to have them all in one place, I suppose, and to know that these are what Jordanians use (as opposed to Lebanese or Syrian speakers of Arabic), but the real value of the book is the expressions and phrases contained in the first half.

• Jordan Dialect (Memrise Course + Audio)

I include this not because the word selection is particularly amazing but simply because it seems to be the only course on Memrise (the vocabulary-learning platform) that teaches Jordanian dialect alongside the audio files. There are lots of other courses offered, including some by students currently in Amman, but none of them offer audio files as well. There are only 736 words available to learn, but it's all Jordanian dialect. To my mind, this course is low-hanging fruit. Someone's made a great selection of vocabulary, most of which you'll use at some point, so I'd recommend just working your way through it relatively quickly.

• The 101 Most Used Verbs in Spoken Arabic: Jordan & Palestine

This book is more than just a guide to using verbs in Jordanian Arabic. It's a repository of sentences and their translations that comes with a CD filled with pronunciation. (As with other books, I really wish CGE would offer the files as digital downloads, since I and most others don't have a CD reader/drive).

The title is actually really deceptive, and I held off getting a copy for far too long because I thought it was just lists of verbs. It is, but at the same time it's a rich trove of sentences, phrases and associated vocabulary. I'd say this book is pretty much essential for anyone who wants to learn Jordanian Arabic. Take a look at this page, for example, to see the kind of thing 101 Verbs contains:

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It's a fantastic mix of phrases, sentences, vocabulary and literal translation or explanation. There are also useful appendices and introductory materials about the grammar of the Arabic verb, lists of broken plurals and various indexes so you can look things up as well.

I spoke with the author of the book (and director of CGE) for the premium edition of 'Master Arabic'.

• Basic Phrasebook - Jordanian Arabic (WikiTravel)

This is nothing more than a list of useful phrases, but as a way to pick up some essentials, this is a free and easy option.

• Pre-Departure Arabic Materials (PeaceCorps)

There are also audio files associated with this document. This is a basic overview of some situations that an English-speaker might encounter in Amman, and offers some basic grammar and vocabulary alongside phrases and cultural explanation. Nothing advanced here, but ideal for total beginners or visitors.

• Conversational Arabic Quick and Easy: Jordanian Dialect

I'd advise you to stay away from this book. It's sold on Amazon and seems to be frequently suggested as a 'suggested purchase' when you buy anything else relating to Jordanian Arabic. Unfortunately, the contents are not very useful. The book also does not use Arabic script; it is all transliterated. Caveat emptor.

• The Arabic Student: Jordanian Arabic

These are all the posts from 'The Arabic Student's blog relating to the Jordanian dialect. It was last updated in 2013, but as a resource it's extremely useful, and he covers a numbers of explanations of phrases, grammar and other interesting features of the dialect. Posts often discuss specific videos (or sections of videos) in detail, so it's a great place to get a taste for the unique features of the dialect alongside some entertainment and comedy.

Listening / Video

• Jordanian Dialect Podcast (Soundcloud)

I co-host this podcast together with Lina Obeidat. We discuss a new topic each week. Show notes include translations of difficult words. The idea behind this podcast was to have some materials available for intermediate students that weren't too difficult, but at the same time didn't dumb things down by using too much English and so on. Details on how to subscribe are available here, or just follow us on Soundcloud.

• Talk In Arabic

Talk In Arabic is a great resource for those who want spoken materials in the various dialects of the Arab-speaking world. The Levantine Dialect section contains a few dozen videos and audio lessons in Jordanian dialect alongside thematically-organised vocabulary lists. Everything is available as audio files (with transcripts and translations) so this is a useful service. Note that the site isn't updated that often, so you might find you can make use of all the materials in a month or two.

• Female Show (Roya)

This is a fun comedy starring comedy superstars, Tima Shomali and Raja'ee Qawwas. I've watched the three seasons of this show through from start to finish and learnt a lot in the process. The level is suitable for an intermediate-level speaker. I'd recommend starting at with season 1, episode 1, to give it a try:

• Usfuriyya (Roya)

This is a medical comedy set in Jordan. Think Scrubs, or think someone trying to imitate Scrubs in the Middle East. The Arabic is also at an appropriate level for someone who has a year or two under their belt.

• Roya TV

Roya is Jordan's preeminent contemporary TV channel. They commission most of the new dramas, comedies and other shows coming out of the country. There's always something interesting to watch here. To watch only their news click here. For their comedy shows, click here. For drama shows, click here. Highly recommended as a way to get exposure to the sound of the dialect.

• Jordan TV

This is the YouTube channel for Jordan's state-run TV station. You can view news broadcasts and more traditional dramas. The content is much more staid in comparison to Roya, but it exposes you to a different style of speech and local culture, so perhaps find a way to intersperse this in with your Roya comedies and dramas.

• LangMedia Arabic

There are a number of different links on this page (to CultureTalk or to their page of Jordanian/Palestinian dialect resources). This is a real treasure trove of materials, much of which is provided with audio, video and full transcripts/translations.

There are also some exercises to go through to test your comprehension. Here's two Jordanians talking about the education system using dialect. Note the transcripts and translations below.

• N20 Comedy

More Jordanian comedy shows. If you watch enough locally-produced TV and comedy you will notice that the same faces show up in many different programmes. Note that N20 has branched out to include other dialects, but it should be fairly easy to distinguish which is which. Lots of material here.

• Accents Library (DLIFLC)

Select Arabic. You'll be presented with a number of stories read by people from different countries. Jordan is one of them. Compare and contrast with the other dialects. This is more a resource to sharpen your ear. Mother-tongue Arabic speakers grew up among this diversity and so are attuned to the tonal and phrasal differences between dialects. This is a resource that can help you improve this skill on your own.

• Phone Conversations

This is a great database and resource of authentic spoken materials in the form of recorded (and transcribed) phone conversations.

Select Arabic and then Levantine. It'll (mostly) be clear when items relate to Jordan. Each conversation comes with a transcription, translation and study plan. The recordings usually last around ten minutes, so it's perfect for a quick study session. Use this to get exposure to authentic natural language.

• GLOSS (DLIFLC)

GLOSS is a resource developed by the US military. You can select the dialect for which you see materials (Levantine, in this case) and it'll show you different exercises to complete. There were over 240 unique items as of January 2017.

Once you go into the individual items, it states which country the dialect is from. I really like that you can choose whether you want the questions and instructions in Arabic, though the interface itself is really horrible. Here's one of the exercises where you pair off words to two columns, depending on the meaning:

View fullsize

Despite the issues with the interface, there's loads of really useful material to work your way through here. This is a great resource.

• Aamiya Arabic (YouTube)

This YouTube channel covers a number of dialects, but you can click through to the playlists to choose Jordan-specific materials. These videos aren't specifically designed for students, but they provide lots of authentic dialogue and dialect appropriate for intermediate students. In this video, for example, sisters Hiba and Lynn talk between themselves about what they're selling at a market stall:

THere's lots to explore in this YouTube channel, and lots of phrases and unique Jordanian expressions to file away in your personal language notebook. Wade in!

• Kharabish Comedy

A mix of dialects here, but Kharabish are originally a Jordanian outfit, so lots of their older material uses that. As with earlier comedy channels, you'll recognise many of the actors and some of the skit premises.

• Ex in the City

This is mostly in English, so probably too basic for intermediate students, but the series covers a number of different expressions and culturally-relevant context. The host explains a new expression each episode.

Teachers / iTalki

There are currently, as of my writing in January 2017, only three tutors from Jordan on iTalki. I've only studied with one, so I'll recommend her highly. You'll recognise her from the Jordanian dialect podcast that we recently started together. Lina Obeidat works with beginners and intermediate students alike, and makes Skype lessons fun by combining free-flow conversation with a variety of other exercises and challenges along the way. I credit Lina with the lion's share of improving my spoken Arabic, so I'd highly recommend you work with her to blast through any difficulties you may have.

Institutes / Study Abroad

I haven't studied at either of these institutes, so I can't attest to the quality of the programmes they offer etc, but I do know that many people in Amman study at these two schools. CGE is founded by Fred Tiedemann, who wrote the essential 101 Verbs I mentioned above and produced many of the videos on their indispensable YouTube channel. They (seem to) take a colloquial-first approach.

Qasid is the other main alternative, and many universities in Europe and the US send their year-abroad language students there for tuition. Both institutes come highly recommended by people who've studied there, but as always with study-abroad programmes, a lot depends on what you put into them.

[NOTE: This list of materials is adapted and drawn from the premium materials available alongside my new book, 'Master Arabic'. For the full resource guide covering other dialects as well as tried-and-tested advice from experts and others who've made it to an advanced level, get the premium edition.]

New Year, New Arabic-language Podcast

This year, in combination with my publishing a book about getting from intermediate-advanced level in Arabic, I wanted to find a way to stay committed to improving my own language. So I’ve started a mostly-Arabic-only podcast.

There are two episodes up already, both from the ‘Jordanian Dialect’ series. This series is recorded with co-host Lina Obeidat, my good friend and Arabic teacher of several years. (Book lessons with Lina on iTalki here. She’s also a regular contributor to talkinarabic.com’s Levantine materials).

During the first episode, we talked about the winter and the rain in Jordan (where we’re both based), and I learnt about the existence of a period of 40 days when the weather is much colder. In our second episode, we talked about taxis in Amman. We struggled to find many positive things to say about the system or the drivers of taxis, but tried to see things from their perspective. At the end, I learned a new proverb that was appropriate to our discussion.

In the coming weeks I’ll be adding more shows to the podcast. There will be a show focusing on Classical Arabic texts. There will be a show on Modern Literature. Potentially we’ll have a show for Egyptian Colloquial (sigh!) but that depends on my finding someone to host it (let me know if you’re interested).

I’m looking forward to recording more episodes. Please leave a comment over on Soundcloud with any feedback you might have. Also, subscribe on iTunes by clicking on this link or search my name and you should find it. The podcast is also available on Overcast. Just search the name and it’ll show up.

Knot 2: Translation as Trauma, Taxis and Artificial Intelligence

This week I fell back in love with a piece of software (DevonThink Pro Office) while reorganising and refreshing two dozen archival databases. I’ve been busy putting the final touches on The Taliban Reader and I’ve made new strides of progress on the slackline.

Articles

• Lina Mounzer - “War in Translation: Giving Voice to
  the Women of Syria” (Lithub)

A deeply affecting account of the author’s work as a translator of stories from Syria, how language mediates and obfuscates the terrifying realities of daily life, and how even translation and re-communication gives rise to secondary trauma of a kind. If you read nothing else this week, make it this article.

• Hamzah Nassif - “Understanding Amman’s Yellow Taxi Dilemma: a Different Take on the Government’s Ongoing Battle With Ride-Hailing Apps” (The Black Iris)

I wrote about Amman’s taxis in my Arabic-language newsletter, and this (slightly old) piece helps answer some of my questions as to why taxi drivers in Jordan’s capital behave as they do. It also makes a strong case for changing the status quo. Taxi drivers seem barely able to make a living under current circumstances, and passengers aren’t getting much of a service.

• David Meyer - “The dark side of .io: How the U.K. is making web domain profits from a shady Cold War land deal” (Gigaom)

As someone who has just bought a couple of new .io domains, I was unsettled to learn the backstory, how something dating back to the early nineteenth century’s colonial expansion (in this case, to the Chagos islands) has a direct descendent in the modern age. I’m most likely not going to return the domains I bought, but I probably won’t buy anything new from the .io set.

• Andrew Ng - “What Artificial Intelligence Can and Can’t Do Right Now” (Harvard Business Review)

There’s nothing especially new in this overview piece by one of the leaders in the field of artificial intelligence, both in terms of innovation and education. But it’s nevertheless a useful summary of some of the unique features of AI and machine learning, as well as some of the things it is less good at.

• Richard Benton - “Language hacking ≠ language love” (Loving Languages)

Richard’s posts are excellent at returning us to the reasons why it’s worth learning languages — to connect, to be useful perhaps, and not to simply chalk up notches on one’s belt. This recent posts is a challenge to the thankfully-less-omnipresent online polyglot community. Recommended if you’ve ever studied more than one second-language.

Books

This week, I reread Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Looking into my Goodreads list, I noted that I gave it a two-star rating when I first read it a few years back. Now, perhaps I was in a better place to absorb some of the lessons, but I gave it four stars. I’ll be writing a longer review for the blog here of some of the more contrarian or unexpected lessons. I’m currently reading Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me alongside Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck* (as audiobook).

Films / TV

I’m working my way through Channel 4’s Humans, albeit painfully slowly. It was recommended on a recent podcast as a possible vision for what a future with humanoid AI machines might look like: not as different as we might imagine, but still different enough to provoke some real societal challenges.

Climbing Routes Without Numbers

On Wednesday I climbed up an ungraded route. The indoor climbing centre where I go once or twice a week has been updating and renewing the different holds they bolt to the wall. We arrived before they had printed out the little square reference signs that run along the bottom of the wall.

In the place of my longtime-favourite warm-up route, a nice yellow-coloured 5A, was a new route populated with deep black jugs. It looked easy from the bottom, but there was no confirmation of this from the grading at the bottom.

Even routes in mountains — particularly in areas where lots of climbers visit — will often have been graded, but I found that I enjoyed climbing up the route without the grade. It returned me to that feeling — one I’ve been struggling to recreate — early on in my time climbing when it wasn’t always about doing the next level or the higher difficulty progression: it was just about enjoying the climbing, enjoying moving my body and whatever thoughts come up when you’re ten or fifteen metres above the ground.

I’ll be trying to pay less attention to the numbers in future sessions and more to the felt and sensed experience of climbing.

Climbing Fuheis: Two and a Half Ascents

This is a video from a recent climbing trip to Fuheis. (Filming courtesy of Felix Kuehn). The weather is starting to turn cold so I feel like maybe this is the last time I’ll get to go climbing outdoors in Jordan until spring comes.

I climbed three times yesterday. I don’t really have a strong sense of what the ratings were on the routes, but I think they were all in the 5s (i.e.5a–5c). You can see the ratings for the route at the wall here.

As I wrote a short while back, I’ve been dealing with things that I thought I’d sorted out weeks ago. My sense of trust of the rope and the comfort up at heights is still pretty good and I’m not too worried about how that is progressing, but yesterday I was unable to complete a route that I had ascended the last time I was there.

I had energy to spare, so it wasn’t a question of not being able to summon the strength to get up; it was more a mental block. I was unable to trust in my feet, in the grip of the shoes on the wall. As one more experienced climber said to me after I had descended, “you need to feel more stable and confident in how you place your feet on the wall”.

I can see the wisdom in what he’s saying, but I think it’s something that comes with time and experience rather than just a mental shift or a technical correction that you can make immediately.

I was also reminded yesterday of the non-linear path that learning often takes, where progression in one area can often be followed by regression a short while later. Over the long run, you’re getting better, but it’s hard to retain that sense of overall perspective.

Last time I went to Fuheis, I had a really good two or three weeks afterwards, spurred by my sense of regret and failure that I experienced while climbing outdoors. I’m more willing to seize the opportunity, to go the extra mile (or inch), so I’m looking forward to the coming few weeks to see what I get up to. I’m feeling confident in where I am and in my general strength and skill progression.

Existential Battles: Climbing in Amman

Me, climbing at Fuheis last week

Over the past few months, since submitting my PhD (and then successfully defending it) I've been engaged in a number of activities that push me outside my comfort zone. From swing dancing to starting a new small business (the 99 Names Challenge) to learning how to code, I've tried to push the envelope of what I know. Like many of us, I'm a creature of habit and routine. I like my routine and my habits. But I also know that those habits and routines -- the same ones that delivered results and even a PhD in the past -- can grow stale. If I'm to grow -- professionally or personally -- I have to get more comfortable with change and with discomfort. The best way to start figuring this out, I have found, is to expose myself to newness and that discomfort as often as possible.

One of the things I've chosen to pursue is climbing. I'd done some bouldering in Holland (at the Delftsebleu centre) a few months back, and a good friend of mine here in Amman mentioned that she does top-rope climbing. The centre here happens to be the biggest climbing facility in the whole Middle East (take that, Dubai!) and there are knowledgeable staff and challenging walls etc so I started going twice a week.

I used to be a runner, but some bone/muscle issues in my foot meant that I haven't actually been running for a year or so. I know and have a strong appreciation for the way exercise and moving my body in general makes me feel better and work better, so I've been looking for a sport or activity to replace running in the meanwhile. (The running was probably a reason why I've neglected any kind of muscular strength training of my upper body. Runners like to be as lean as possible.)

Now is probably also a good time to mention that I have a fairly intense fear of heights. I'm not exactly sure when or where it started, but some key experiences in my mid-childhood certainly contributed to it becoming what it is now. I went to a boarding school in the north of England, near York, so there were lots of outside activities. During the summer, and at 'holiday camp'-type experiences, we were taken to do various adventure challenges on the weekends.

My 'adventures' included abseiling off high bridges, potholing in claustrophobia-inducing narrow passageways (and having my foot get stuck half-way), as well as various obstacle courses positioned in trees and so on. I resented the fact that we had no choice in the matter and I resented the fact that it was less about training or learning a skill than simply having an experience. I remember being pushed off the bridge by the instructor, clipped into a harness but unsure whether I'd survive the descent.

Since that time, I've avoided activities or experiences that necessitated me visiting high-up places. Confession: I even never made it all the way up Kandahar's Forty Steps (chilzina) for this reason. Halfway was my limit.

Amman's ClimbAt centre

Cut to the present day: I'm 10 or 15 metres up a wall at Amman's Climbat centre. This seems to be the point where things shift. My existential battle begins. I use those words only partially in jest.

The first time I tried rope climbing, I only made it to that half-way point, not knowing to trust the rope, not knowing to trust the knot I'd tied or the harness or a million other things.

Now, I can make it half-way up without too much angst, but then it begins. Rivers of sweat open up all over my body. The most distracting ones are the unceasing flow on my hands. Climbers use magnesium chalk to deal with this problem, though mostly it's just everyday sweaty palms. I dip my hands into the bag, holding on to the wall with my other hand, feeling my grip slip as the waterworks go to town. I see that my palm is sufficiently white with chalk. I swap hands, repeating the process with the other, only to find that in the meanwhile my first hand has sweated through the first application of chalk.

My inner dialogue kicks up. I wonder why I'm here, on the wall, trying to climb up. I look at the rope and the knot, wondering if I would even be able to tell if there was something wrong with it, I look around me at the other climbers, each breezing up their respective paths on the wall with seeming ease. Sometimes I look below me.

I try to talk myself down. It's a different kind of anxiety from that I've experienced before public speaking, that social anxiety that makes your heart race, your stomach churn and the adrenaline pump. Up on the wall, it isn't that adrenaline rush I feel. In fact, aside from the sweating, it's more symptomatically benign, expressing itself in the form of a puzzle or a predicament that I can sometimes remain detached from.

Usually the thing that works best is to try to focus on the physical experience of the moment, on my breath and what that feels like in my body, on the sensations of my fingers on the wall, on the feeling of gravity pulling me back down towards the earth. That sometimes manages to carve enough space that I can then try to think about the problem more analytically -- the problem of which step to take next. If I'm stuck in my existential loop it's hard to make those decisions and I end up wasting energy trying and retrying the same holds and foot movements, to no avail. This tires me out on a muscular level and the problem is compounded.

A week ago, I set my mental discomfort to one side and went outdoor climbing with some friends to a wall or crag near the city of Fuheis (see the photo at the top of this post). Climbing outside felt like even more of a proposition than the indoor wall. More possibility of failure, perhaps. I'm not precisely sure. It's sometimes hard to put my finger on the precise configuration of my fear. But it ended up going well. I ascended the wall, nothing went wrong and I even enjoyed the experience. It took me an age and a half to get up, but the getting up there was all me. I'm less likely to do regular outdoor climbing, since it's more of a hassle to arrange, but it's not going to be something I say no to in the future.

Needless to say, my ongoing climbing practice is exactly that: a work in progress. I'm working on both the physical and the mental blocks simultaneously and while I'm fairly confident that I'll be in a more confident and stronger place in a month or two from now, I'm also frustrated by the slow pace of progress.

To cherry-pick signs of improvement, I'm no longer quitting half-way up the wall. Most times -- as long as the route isn't too difficult -- I generally reach the top, even if it sometimes means multiple iterations of sweaty-hand-mind and multiple recommitments to completing the route. Even though climbing isn't necessarily a sport where you use your arms much -- it's much more about your legs and how you balance and position your body -- you do need at least *some* upper body strength and this is starting to come. I get a pleasurable sense of satisfaction when I return home after half a day spent at the climbing wall, and I'm wearing my muscle soreness as a badge of achievement.

I'm pretty sure that the solution to my mid-wall fears rests in being more conscious of what's going on and what I'm feeling earlier in the climb, and there are a bunch of mental exercises and training that seem to work for many climbers. I'm keen to put some of those into practice.

When it comes down to it, everything is in your mind, especially with rope climbing where the dangers associated with falling or losing your grip on the wall are pretty minimal. Worst case, you bash up against the wall and get a bruise or two. (I have a bunch of those on my knees already.) But the rest, that's all something I can work on and improve at (I hope). Watch this space for an update in a few weeks once I've been doing battle for a bit longer.

Walking Amman

I’ve been walking around Amman a little in the past couple of days. My poor sense of direction with the city’s somewhat haphazard street layout mean I make use of digital GPS maps on a regular basis. In Europe or North America, Google Maps is my service of choice, with due acknowledgement of their general creepiness.

But I discovered yesterday that Google Maps is pretty atrocious when walking around Amman. Either their data is old and of poor quality, or the algorithm for calculating time/distance between two points is not properly calibrated for a city with many hills. If you look on Google Maps’ display, you’ll see what looks like a flat terrain. Everything can seem very close. If you look out of the window, or walk on the streets, you’ll see that hills and a highly variable topography are very much a part of the experience of the city. (This gives some idea of it).

Google Maps knows how to deal with hills or variable terrain. After all, San Francisco, close to their centre of operations, is a pretty hilly city and I found the maps and the estimated timings worked pretty well when I was there last year. Which suggests to me that the problem isn’t that Google forgot to take into account topography but rather that the data is poor.

I’m studying data science-y things these days, so I thought a bit about how they might improve this data. Some possible solutions:

1. They’re already monitoring all the data coming from app usage etc, so why not track whether its estimations match up with how long people actually take to walk certain streets/routes. Mix that in with the topography data, and average it all out.
2. They could send out more cars. I don’t know how accurate the map data for driving in Amman is, but some anecdotal accounts suggest that it suffers from similar problems. This is probably too expensive, and I’m assuming it’d be preferable to find a solution that doesn’t require custom data collecting of this kind. Maybe something for when the world has millions of driverless cars all powered by Google’s software, but for now it’s impractical as a solution.
3. Find some abstract solution based on satellite-acquired topographic data which takes better account of gradients of roads etc.

For the moment, Google Maps is pretty poor user experience as a pedestrian. Yesterday evening I was walking back home from the centre of town. The walk would, Google told me, take only 12 minutes. 40+ minutes later I arrived home.

Others have noted this same problem and suggested an alternative: OpenStreetMap data. The data is unattached to a particular app, but I downloaded one alongside the offline mapping data for Jordan/Amman. It seems pretty good at first glance, and I’ll be testing it out in the coming days. I’m interested o learn why it seems to perform better. My initial hypothesis is that its data is just better than that which Google Maps is using.

Jordan Diaries: Start with Geography

I arrived in Jordan this morning and am beginning my attempts to get to know the lay of the land. First thing is always geography. If I don't have those mental hooks to know that someone is talking about a particular muhafadha  / governorate, I can't properly engage in the conversation / information, so the only way to do this at the beginning is to learn a bunch of those initial hooks in a more deliberate fashion. Later on, you can learn things naturally, incorporating new pieces of information as you hear it, but at the beginning you need that initial scaffolding.

To that end, I'm starting off with Memrise's Governorates of Jordan course, which teaches you all the names, plus their administrative capital town. I'll be doing the same with Amman's geography over the coming days, too, though no pre-written course exists so I will have to make one myself. For Amman, I can combine the more abstract map-work with travelling to see the various places with my own eyes. Then I can combine the two together for a solid grasp of the geography and different neighborhoods. In due course I will also be travelling around the various parts of Jordan for myself, but for now I have to content myself with learning all their names.

On Learning New Skills, #showyourwork and other housekeeping

Newly released from life under the PhD regime, I have been exploring new interests and indulging my curiosity down new pathways. Last time I wrote, I explained how I had taken to studying sharks and various aspects of conservation and marine biology. There was a certain amount of training around higher-level concepts in that course: in particular, on the scientific method, ways to problem-solve and so on, but in general the emphasis was on the material rather than specific skills.

I think that learning new skills -- expanding the lenses you have through which to view the world, or giving yourself more options for a variety of perspectives -- is an important part of becoming more useful. To that end, language learning was always an important part of getting to know any subject or place (either the implicit language of a particular domain, or the explicit language of a people or country).

Recently, I've taken to trying to expand my numeric and digital literacy. I've always been technically literate, at least to the extent that I was able to solve my problems, fiddle with code a little and play around with technical tools and programmes for which I have no formal training. That said, there is a wide gulf between that position and a more confident data literacy, where I can interpret things through the lens(es) of statistics, use tools to analyse what is going on and so on. I've always felt like this was a core weakness in my ways of understanding the world, so I'm now trying to address or remedy that.

My first step is to address the gaping holes. These are a mix of mathematics, statistics, probability as well as things like computational languages that will allow me to engage in these disciplines with more than a basic-level understanding. There is a fair amount of debate as to whether the name is useful or not, but for now, I'll state that I'm training myself in 'data science'.

I learn these kinds of skills best through a practice- and feedback-rich environment, so I'm taking a project-based approach to my studies. Khan Academy (what a resource!) is my mentor for mathematics, and Udacity (whose courses I've taken in the past and been very impressed by) is helping with the Python/coding aspect. Each skill group I learn is followed by a mini-project that allows me to use the skills in an applied context.

All of this is by way of introduction to what I really wanted to talk about today, which is a recent problem that I encountered while completing my coursework. The details don't matter that much, so I won't get into them, but suffice it to say for now that I was trying to write a python function that calculated the number of days between one date and another date.

One feature of coding that I find frustrating is the way loops (bits of code that repeat for as long as certain conditions remain met/unmet) can be included within loops, and sometimes maybe another set as well within the loop-within-a-loop. I'm new to this stuff, so this level of recursion (is that even the right word? I'm pretty sure recursion is used for something else) makes my brain hurt when I try to think about it too much. But think about it I must.

So there I was, with some broken bit of code, no idea how to move forward. The answer to the problem was just one click away, but I didn't want to just see the answer. I wanted to learn the thing that was absent. I wanted to learn how to get from my state of confusion to a state of understanding.

This seems to be a common enough problem in my new studies that I thought it might be useful to describe. You can explain the solution, at which point you understand how that particular problem was solved, but how do you improve the likelihood that you'll be able to solve a different problem in the future? Does looking at the solution help? Does spending a week staring at a piece of paper, wishing the solution to magically appear, help?

In the end, what I'm trying to get better at is problem-solving. As far as I've been able to read so far (in books like Sebastian Gutierrez's fantastic Data Scientists at Work), this skill is valued far above any specific skills like competence in one programming or computational language vs another. The specific languages can all be learnt. Getting better at solving problems, interviewees seem to constantly imply, that is much harder.

Which is where I am, trying to solve hard (hard for me, at least) problems.

My solution involved thinking about the problem more deliberately. Udacity hosts an online forum where students can post bits of code, questions etc. There's usually someone who answers the question within 24 hours. The emphasis is on finding new ways to think about problems rather than just providing the answer. So, teaching you how to fish instead of giving you a fish. That old chestnut.

I posted a question. In writing out the question, I was forced to be more deliberate in how I thought out the problem. By specifying the exact point where I saw something going wrong, I was forced to be more sequential, more methodical. I started to see new pathways forward to progress with the problem. I would then go off and work a bit more until I hit another roadblock, at which point I'd post a follow-up question. Then a bit more insight would follow the process of writing up the problem. Then a bit more work, another roadblock. You get the idea. I think I submitted 4 different questions/writeups in as many hours. By the end, I had thought my way out of the problem. Nobody needed to reply to my query; I had solved it myself.

This is quite a simple insight, in many ways: writing things down, making them concrete... these are things that help with the process of thought. Thought, taken out of the mushy-tissue-filled black box that is our brains and put on paper, is something that benefits from being methodical. I'd long known (at least, theoretically or implicitly) that writing helps thought. Every time I've worked on an essay or on a book, the process has clarified my thought in ways that wouldn't have been possible had I just remained satisfied with 'thinking' about things.

There are a bunch of small project ideas I have and want to use as ways of practising my new / fledgeling skills. I have certain data sets from my time in Afghanistan that I'd like to work with. There are other interests that I'd like to stimulate by applying this new tool / set of tools.

#showyourwork

This brings me neatly to my second point. I finished a book by Austin Kleon recently and it revolves around similar-ish ideas. Kleon talks about the importance of sharing the process of work as well as the work itself. He explains a bunch of the reasons why this is a smart idea, and he discusses various ways that you can enact this as a guiding practice going forward.

It reminded me that the last major learning experience I went through (not including languages or personal growth) was when I started travelling in and learning about Afghanistan. I was writing lots back then, either in emails to a group of friends and family, or later in blog form or in articles written for free for local magazines. (In my work for AfghanWire, too, I drafted a mini-encyclopedia of sorts, with entries for the important pieces of context (people, places, events). Researching all of that was a huge task, but looking back I'm certain that I learnt a lot through the process.)

The same thing happened when I started studying sharks, as I explained last time. I used twitter as a way of connecting with scholars and people who had already spent years studying the discipline. I used my podcast, Sources & Methods, to connect to at least one group (the Gills Club --> see the podcast here) and to connect to talk about that new interest.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I will be blogging more. Most blogs will not be as long as this, or previous posts. In the past, I would only consider it worth blogging if I had taken a week or few to gather together all the relevant insights to a particular topic or issue, but I'm not sure that's reasonable any more (thanks to Kleon's book) and I want to benefit from the power that comes from writing through problems on a more regular basis.

Housekeeping

I mentioned that I'm done with the PhD. So now the rest of my life starts. I haven't decided on the next step just yet, and there still some loops that need tying off. I have some research/report-writing to finish, a novel written last year during a fit of PhD-procrastination to edit/rework, and more to be done with my Jordanian colloquial Arabic.

One somewhat important development is that I'm moving to Amman (Jordan) this coming week. I'm not sure how long I'll be there, but consider it my base from now on. If you're ever passing through town, please do drop me a line.

My final piece of news is that Felix and I have signed a contract to work on a new book for Hurst (title and all other details TBC) which will be an anthology of Taliban writings/statements. It'll cover the whole gamut of their experience from the 1980s up until the present day. We'll be drawing from the materials of the Taliban Sources Project as well as other sources we've gathered along the way in previous years. I'm quite excited about the project, and it'll be an amazing resource once out. The problem for a lot of research, as I've mentioned before, is that the primary sources aren't used half as much as they ought. We hope this project will offer a corrective in this respect.