Summer Programs in Arabic for College Students

JHS
Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:52:53 +0000

The Chicago program is a 6-hour/day intensive program, not an immersion program. As with everything else at Chicago, it is theory- and grammar-based, not conversation-based. My son learned a lot of grammar and vocabulary, and a lot about how Arabic is constructed. Maybe if he were someplace else he would have learned enough to be able to transition to Arabic II. But where he was – Chicago itself – there was a pretty bad disjunction between summer Arabic I and regular-term Arabic II. After a couple of class sessions and assignments, it was clear to him that he would have weeks of work to catch up to where he was supposed to be to take the next class. The uselessness of it was that it wasn’t really Arabic I, it was more like Arabic 0.75.