Happy 2016!

It's been a while, so I thought I would update so that when I have something important to share there won't have been a two year long gap in between posts.

I apparently stopped blogging after the glorious madness that was Eid, but I'm hoping to re-start, if only so that my language learning goals are accountable to the void that is the internet. CLS was a wonderful experience, and despite the fact that we were in the middle of a 100 degree desert for two months, I felt it was over too soon.

According to my end of program OPI, I now speak Arabic at an advanced level. I don't ~feel~ like I speak it that well, but that discrepancy just makes me want to keep learning, until my confidence matches my skills on paper. To do that, I have continued to take the Arabic courses that my school provides, Business Arabic last semester and Modern Arabic Culture and Conversation in this coming one. I'll talk more about those in a future post, but because of the difference in my skills and those of most of my classmates (thanks to a year abroad in the Middle East), I knew the Arabic classes would be relatively easy. So I took Russian too, which has been a challenge, but has also re-awakened the feelings of glee that come with learning something totally new. I had been in a bit of an Al-Kitaab inspired rut with Arabic, but Russian is new and exciting every day, and I think the enthusiasm is rubbing off on my desire to study Arabic as well.

As for this year's language resolutions and goals:
1. Re-connect with my Omani language partner, who I adore but failed to maintain contact with.
2. Talk to my fellow Arabic students in Arabic more often.
3. Return to the Middle East. (A distant dream...)
4. Be more outgoing, and speak Arabic with friendly strangers and strange friends and all of the above.
5. Read the Arabic books I have, keep searching for new ones.
6. Basically, don't move backwards!
7. Practice Russian for one hour each day.
8. Read more books by Arab and Russian authors, in translation or not.
9. Encourage more people to take interesting, non-European languages, and share my experiences abroad, encourage people who might not otherwise to apply for things like CLS.
10. Find a job or post-graduate internship or whatever that allows me to use my language skills on a regular basis.