Challenging my brain

I was thinking about it for awhile, and finally schedules aligned in way I could do it, but I've started a course in Basic Conversational Arabic. (!)

Not that I have any plans to visit some Arabic-speaking country, or even pass through. I wanted a challenge, to see if my brain could do this. I don't expect to become fluent, even if I take the next course (so far, the place where I am taking it only has 2).

Challenging it is! It starts with the fact that the Arabic alphabet is quite different from our own, though some sounds are similar. Next is that it's written right-to-left. Then there is the way that letters change their appearance depending on whether they are standing alone, the initial letter of a word, or a medial letter, or the final letter.

There are a few vowels, but to a large extent vowel sounds are implied between two consonants.

On a practical level, we're on two separate tracks at this stage (I've only had 2 classes), one being the learning of the alphabet and how to write it depending on its place in a word, and the other hearing and speaking Arabic, which currently relies almost entirely on phonetic spellings to help recognize and remember the sounds. Later, we'll drop the phonetic spellings, once we've sufficiently covered the Arabic alphabet.