I am taking Arabic in my college as my foreign language. Now, the languange itself isn't as hard as say Spanish was. Perhaps the fundamentals of sentence structure and feminine/masculine words was laid out by my 5 years of Spanish, but whatever.
I have two issues with my class. If it wasn't for these two things, I'd be getting As in the class easily.
1) The vocabulary covered in the book.
2) How my professor teaches.
Let's start with the second, since it can easily be misread. Simply, my professor gives us homework on things we don't cover until the next day or the day after. Meaning, even if you read the book, you cannot understand it. If you have questions, too bad. Got to turn it in anyway. Every day we get papers marked all over in red ink and the typical, "DO IT AGAIN!" in very hard to read writing. (He's left handed and from Morocco, so writing in English characters tends to lead to running letters together.) We finally asked why we don't do something and then do homework to reinforce it, like in most classes, and he said he wants us to learn from our mistakes. Often times it gets to the point where I've been working on an exercise for an hour, my head hurts and no dictionary has a word I'm looking for and I give up or guess. In other words, I learned nothing and only got frustrated.
My other issue is the vocabulary we're learning. In most basic language courses, you start with simple words. Mom, dad, dog, cat, the days of the week and colors. In this book, our first vocabulary set involved the word "United Nations". The second had "Specialist". Third has "Army" and "Officer". Me, being the cynical American that I am, immediatly thought, "********, if I use some of these in any Muslim country I'll be killed." I an either talk about the war in the Middle East, or how the UN ******** over Palestine and played America, forcing people who lived there into small, pathetic little pieces of land. *cough* Native Americans. *cough* I can't say, "I like the color green." Or, "My dog is brown and white." I can say "I have a dog", or "My dad works for the United Nations as a translator", but I can't say some of the most basic things in any language. And colors won't be discussed until next semester, or even nest year which I will not be taking.
Apparently some students went to a meeting where they talked with the people who wrote our textbook, and they explained why it's written like that. They wrote a story of a fictional girl and based EVERYTHING on her life. Different, yes, but not functional or practical. It's interesting, but if I wanted to actually converse with someone my topics are limited to what this imaginary b***h is dealing with in her life. So the book is written in a very roundabout way.
TL;DR: My professor has an a**-backwards way of teaching and the book is written a**-backwards.
Kem Pet Unsu Community Member 
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