Fresh Start for Arabic (by Annie)

Starting a New Habit

In planning goals for the year, several were written with the purpose of beginning them after our first visa trip. This gave me several months to focus on living life in Lebanon and being a mom. We just returned from our first visa trip for 2016, and I am taking the refreshment and rejuvenation and harnessing it into my word of the year: Discipline. I am not going to lose momentum, so even though I came back from London with an airplane cold I have started studying Arabic for 1 hour every day.

Learning the Language

I want to speak Arabic. When we attended MTI in 2014 we knew that we needed to have some serious internal motivators because there are so many ways to get away with not speaking Arabic here. Many missionaries who come never learn Arabic. However, we were called to come here and love the people as Jesus would. God knows my language and he knows their language, and I am going to learn the language. There are many challenges, and as I walk this language learning journey I hope to share some of them. However, the biggest challenge, and the one I am overcoming this week is ME.

This is not a goal that others are going to be pushing me to complete. If I don’t pay attention to the lesson or follow through, no one is going to be upset. Everyone in my life is encouraging and understanding and giving me grace. So it is up to me to be internally motivated. To remember the purpose of learning the heart language of these people.

I have to move from WANTING to learn Arabic to NEEDING to learn Arabic.

Baby Steps

The second battle within myself is that Louis is so far ahead of me. He is at a Conversational level and I am not even at a Survival level of Arabic yet. It is hard every time I study to realize how little I know. In spending time staring at how far ahead Louis is, I have not moved forward. It is time to Just Start. Learning a Language is much like Losing Weight. I know what to do, diet and exercise, so I have to do that, and then stay off the scale. Stop measuring and judging, just do the steps day by day.

Self Study

To start taking steps I took a critical look at my life for just the month of May and wrote a plan. I am going to study on my own for May. My main method of studying will be the Pimsleur Eastern Arabic course which I have been successfully following through with each day since returning from London.

The second aspect to the plan is that it is the 3^rd thing to happen EVERY DAY.

1. Wake up = (Get Dressed for the Day, Breakfast with Davy, Coffee)
2. Memverse
3. Arabic

This way there is no excuse, and it gets done every day.

Future Outlook

May

This blog is how I keep accountable for a lot of my goals, and to keep me reflective, so that I can see progress instead of beating myself up. Therefore, I will be adding Arabic to my weekly goals. We have our first interns coming tomorrow, and I will be completing the language assignments Louis gives them as well.

June

By June I would like to have 2 language helpers.

July

In July I will be calling our language teacher as well to see if she will have any openings once Davy starts school.

August/September

Review the plan and revamp based on Davy starting school in September.