ColorlessGreen

Hi folks, Pleased to meet y'all. I just accepted an offer from Iowa, so I'm joining your little party here. I'm also a current student, so I can tell you, captiv8ed, we don't get that many major snowstorms, but what snow we get stays forever. It doesn't melt for simply ages. Right now, though, we're getting rain instead. It's kind of pleasant, actually - I really like spring in Iowa City. I just wish it started earlier.

I've taken one semester of Hebrew, and 3 of Arabic, so I can speak from experience. Judging from my classmates in these two classes, I'd say they seemed to have less difficulty with Hebrew than Arabic. After just one semester, my Hebrew classmates had learned to speak about as well as my Arabic classmates could after a semester and a half. Of course, this might just be due to the fact that we spent longer learning the Arabic alphabet than we did the Hebrew (unnecessarily, to my mind - it shouldn't take half a semester to learn the alphabet). Another factor is that there are fewer variants of Hebrew than of Arabic, so that's definitely a plus. I don't know what precisely you would be doing with Arabic, so this may not apply, but I'm sure you're aware that every Arabic-speaking country speaks a slightly different variant. Some differ only in vocabulary, some in grammar. MSA is really never used except in formal writing, as far as I'm aware. So if your interest is in formal academic papers or books, for example, MSA will get the job done, but if you would like to read newspapers or something of the sort, I believe that many of them are written more colloquially, with vocabulary or grammatical forms from the local dialect - but I am far from an expert, so perhaps someone else on this forum can correct me. As to your experience with Biblical Hebrew, I can promise you that Modern Hebrew is quite different. It was essentially reinvented in the middle of the century, so it is less closely related to other Semitic languages now than it used to be. As far as I know, Biblical and Modern Hebrew are not mutually intelligible. Now, Modern Hebrew has fewer verb forms than MSA, which could be a factor in your decision of which one to study. If you do decide to study Hebrew, I recommend "Hebrew from Scratch." It's primarily meant for conversational learning, but it is also really helpful in explaining grammatical concepts, giving examples, offering useful vocabulary lists, etc. And really, I think you would be hard-pressed to find a textbook aimed at teaching a student to read and write alone. I got a little bit off-track there, but what I basically wanted to say was that Modern Hebrew and MSA should be pretty similar in terms of "difficulty" (as a linguist, I don't believe in ranking languages based on perceived difficulty), but Hebrew might be a bit easier for native speakers of English. It varies, of course, based on the specific person, but the level of effort involved in learning either language would probably be very similar, so you should choose based on which one seems like it would be more useful in your future studies.

It really depends on how motivated you are. Are you able to make a commitment to work on learning it every day? Will you get a textbook/workbook and work your way through it on a regular basis? The thing about learning a language on your own is that you, and only you, are responsible for making sure you do it. You won't have a teacher correcting your homework or a tutor pushing you to practice. You will be solely responsible for your progress. That said, if you really can make that commitment, it shouldn't be any more difficult to learn to read/translate MSA than any other language (although I definitely would not recommend the self-taught approach for learning to speak!). Once you teach yourself the alphabet (which honestly isn't too hard, despite its initial intimidating appearance), the written language is not that bad. MSA is SVO like English, has noun-adjective order like Spanish, and, other than a bit of funkiness with determining specificity, shouldn't be that confusing for a native English speaker. MSA does have a consonantal root system, which can be either a blessing or a curse - a blessing, in that you will be easily able to identify new words with the same root as words you know, and a curse, in that you will have to memorize vowel sequences that correspond to each meaning. I have found that the pros outweigh the cons on that front. If you want a simple textbook that will explain things basically clearly and hold your hand a bit towards the beginning, I can recommend Al-Kitaab as one that I've used with some success. It's a bit more focused on speech, but it also has passages excerpted from newspapers and websites that can give you some great practice reading. You might also want to pick up a copy of the Hans Wehr Arabic-English dictionary - in fact, it is on Scribd, if you want an online copy. Good luck! I hope things go well for you.

I had the free trial of Amazon Prime for a couple of months, but I decided not to get the paid membership at the end. Certainly, it was helpful in getting the one textbook I forgot to buy until three days before I needed it for class, but other than that, there was nothing I bought that I couldn't have waited longer for. I think in order to make it worthwhile, you would have to not only buy A LOT, but also need everything IMMEDIATELY, which simply is not the case for me. I'd say spend the $80 that Prime costs on the books you want instead, and just wait a little bit longer for them. Even Amazon's regular shipping speed is pretty fast, after all. And just think of how many books you could get with $80! (Of course, this is assuming you buy in bulk, instead of just getting one book at a time. I buy from Amazon less often, but I always make sure I hit the $25 mark when I do.)

Hey, congratulations!

I returned from spring break today to find an offer of admission from Indiana waiting for me in my mailbox. Life is so good. Good luck to all of you who are still waiting!

I understand acceptance depression completely. I still haven't heard back about funding from the school I've been accepted to, and it's eating me up inside as I think ahead to how I'd survive if they gave me no money at all, and what that would say about me as a student, considering how well the faculty know me. Then, of course, there's the anxiety of wondering if I can take living in the Land of Winter any longer, of worrying if I could be a competent grad student while surrounded by my undergraduate friends, who don't understand how much work it takes, and of trying to figure out, would my teachers be disappointed in me if I ended up turning them down? I think I'm just tired of drama. And reality.

Iowa's my undergrad institution. It's a great place - although there have been times in the middle of winter when I wished I was anywhere else (I'm really not that fond of the cold). But the campus is really beautiful around late March/early April when the trees start to blossom again and you can go for walks by the river with only a light coat on. The environment is a lot more friendly than you would find in a large city as well, and the crime rate is quite low. And, of course, there's plenty to do downtown and in nearby Coralville. If you came here, I'm sure you wouldn't regret it.

As an undergrad in Iowa City, I've been living in the dorms, so you may want to take my advice with a grain of salt. However, I can give you a bit of basic advice, if you like. If quiet is what you want, avoid the downtown area to the east of the river, near campus. That means Market, Burlington, Gilbert, Dodge, Van Buren, and Johnson streets, essentially. From what I know, however, the area south of Burlington is pretty quiet - the people who tend to hang out near the bars don't really go into the residential areas unless they live there, and most of them tend to be undergraduates living in the apartments nearer campus. Just about anywhere on the west side of the river is great. Quiet, relatively close to campus, etc. The Cambus, which is the free busline run by the university, stops at several places on Melrose Ave that I know of, so I'd guess that University Heights would be a great place to live for convenience, if you can find any houses to rent there. If you live farther away from campus, you might want to invest in a public bus pass - even if you have a car, the parking on campus can be a real pain, and expensive as well. I'm not sure about pricing, but Iowa City is pretty cheap in general. I think that renting a house for somewhere between $1500 and $3000 a month is common, but I'm not that sure about the quality of the house. Good luck to you! Iowa City's a pretty nice, affordable place to live, so you should be able to find a place you like at a decent price.

Two for the price of one, eh? Congratulations!

I like March. March is good. Got an acceptance on the first day, so I figure this is my month! I knew it couldn't all be like February...

I got admitted! The University of Iowa, MA program with thesis. I am so excited right now. I really wasn't expecting to hear anything from them for weeks - the deadline was just today! Still no word on financial aid, but I can wait. It's good enough just knowing that someone wants me.

I don't know too much about sociolinguistics, but if you're still at school currently, your library probably subscribes to some journals that could be helpful in identifying research you would be interested in. I would recommend The Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Journal of Sociolinguistics, and Language and Linguistics Compass. The last is the only one I've read, and I can recommend it highly. A few professors I respect enormously are on the editorial board. As to e-mailing professors, I think a short, friendly self-introduction and a few questions about their current research would be fine. Make sure that you check out their websites first to make sure that you aren't asking anything obvious - maybe skim a few recent papers of theirs as well, then ask some specific questions. I'd suggest keeping it short. If they're interested in continuing the conversation, you can expand later. When you actually start your applications, just remember that, as a non-ling BA, you'll have to make it really clear why you are interested in linguistics. To that end, you should probably read as much as you can now in order to prove that you really know what you're getting yourself into. Best of luck to you!

I got my first rejection on Friday and my second today. I was really expecting rejection from the beginning, but it aches all the same, just a little. I'm working on back-up plans for what to do if I get rejected from the other schools I've applied to as well. Maybe go to a few conferences, come up with a better writing sample, teach English?