Thursday, March 19, 2020
What to Do Now
What to Do Now - Dominic Brunaccioni
Good evening!
Since my last post, coronavirus had yet to destroy the rest of the semester as we know it, and so here we are. As far as I know, the Language Exchange Program (LEP) has been postponed to next semester. In other words, my aspirations of learning Indonesian have been put on hold until the start of next fall, if the school lets us go back. My trip to Spain, Portugal, and Morocco are up in the air, so learning Basque seems almost as fruitless as checking my local grocery store for toilet paper nowadays. So I have no Indonesian partner, and my trip to the Basque Country is now on life support. I am left without any clear idea as to what my logs will entail for the rest of the online semester.
There is one positive notion that I may share with you all. I am attempting to communicate with the Georgetown professor who is the head of the Turkish section in their language department so I can secure a spot in Beginner Turkish at Georgetown next academic year. Fingers crossed it all works out. I’ve been cleared by my first-year advisor, the SIS Peer Advising team, and the head of the language department at American. Hopefully, that is enough support for me to get into the class next year.
If there is any positive to the coronavirus, its that I’m back at home. That means being close to those I love and care for. One of those people is my old Arabic tutor that taught me a year of Arabic to prep me for my Freshmen year at AU. Being from Egypt, she has the Egyptian Arabic dialect, known as مصري. So I learned Arabic alongside a less used dialect. But upon my arrival at American, the Arabic program teaches Arabic using the formal and non-used dialect, with the letters from the Levantine dialect, known as الشامي. So I totally lost my مصري alphabet and pronunciation of words. Now that I’m back home, we have continued weekly meetings (On Facetime for the sake of social distancing) so I can ace my AU Arabic class, but also to reshape my مصري dialect.
So although everything seems lost, I look forward to a bright future. I hope everyone is healthy and are feeling mentally sound. Thank you for reading, I’ll see you online soon!
~ Dom
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