Back to the Drawing Board

After looking into things further, I have determined that the new and improved Level II of Pimsleur Eastern Arabic is totally unrelated to the ancient Level I got from the library—the one I have spent the past three weeks struggling through. I am mildly despondent to realize that I will now have to redo all of Level I using the correct, revised version of the lessons. This is frustrating for several reasons: 

1. That’s 30 lessons I have to redo! Half an hour each.
2. I worked very hard to get Level I done. I did some of those lessons four times, maybe even more.
3. I will have to pay for Level I whereas I thought I was getting it for free from the library.
4. It is psychologically a bummer to have to redo something you think you have finished. Especially if you have spent three weeks on it.

One odd thing I am noticing: the new lessons place a lot of emphasis on the Arabic equivalents for “miss,” “ma’am,” and “sir”; I am being encouraged to tack these courtesy titles onto a large percentage of conversational sentences. This was not the case with the old CDs. Did someone at Pimsleur decide Arabic speakers would regard people as rude if they didn’t include “ma’am” or “sir” after every inquiry about the weather? And is that accurate?

The thing is, audio language lessons often teach people excessively formal speech, so I can’t help feeling skeptical that this addition is as necessary as it’s being made out to be. I feel like an idiot saying “miss” or “sir” at the end of the most mundane of sentences. It feels completely unnatural.

Discomfort. Welcome to a first principle of foreign language studies.