women in islam

I have two hours of class a day right? Doesn't sound like much, but it really can be a lot. I restarted class at the beginning of the week. On Saturday I go to class. My teacher & I do what we generally have been doing. First hour is Al-Kitaab and the second hour is a reading exercise. Well, it's supposed to be reading. I generally get bored with the story about a sentence in and then just go as fast as possible. screw comprehension or vocabulary additions. We got through the first page of a story on Sindibad. And I began stalling. Bringing up just about any subject I could think of to NOT move on to the next page. It's soul crushing.

Finally, I looked at her and I was like "I don't want to read this." (I should probably note that I've gone through about three books, reading one story or so from all of them and finally just being like "No, I don't want to do this.") Seriously, most of the time the stories are okay enough, but I'm not that interested and they are too difficult to do in class with my teacher who doesn't speak very much English. So I ask her if we can read something about Islam or life in Yemen. Because this stuff interests me more than stories that I've heard before in English. She sounds excited and tells me that she will bring something in the next day.

So Sunday comes around and she's brought books from her house. Which is cool. We look through them, and I run upstairs to show her this random book that I bought in a bookstore because it says "to muslim women" on the cover, with a picture of a woman in hijab. She looks at it, reads part of it and is like "yeah, it's good" so I decide to use that one, because then I can feel free to write in it and all that jazz.

And thus we start! We get about a line in and I'm like WHOA! This is amazingly difficult. Especially since (i repeat) my teacher does not speak English very much. So, I stop her, and we agree that I will look work on it at home with the dictionary and come back to class and we can talk about it. She suggests I try to get through the entire section on hijab, about a page and a half. I think "Sure. It might be alot, but I'll get as far as I can, maybe half-way or something"

I go home and start in with the dictionary. After working for probably three or four hours, I am four lines in. I haven't even finished the first paragraph. On top of that, the subject keeps changing back and forth. So, I give up for the evening.

I would like to note that even though it was difficult and a bit frustrating, I was holding up pretty well. I looked up all but maybe 10 words from those four lines and I mostly found all of them (Arabic dictionaries are harder than European languages, I swear)

I think my teacher was a little disappointed in how far I got, but we worked through the rest of the paragraph together and then I went and got it translated with the dictionary. It has some great vocabulary. Though I got a little frustrated when I looked up this word and the dictionary told me it meant "to look up alphabetically" and I was trying so hard to figure out how that fit into the sentence. Trying trying, and I get to class, where my teacher is like "No! That's a name of Satan!" OH! and now the sentences sense!

And suddenly I realized how long this post was. I guess I'll leave it just as suddenly.