Al-Kitaab: The Bittersweet End

by Leah Gilman on May 3, 2011

“I never, ever, have to put this CD in my computer again if I don’t want!”

My roommate, a fellow Arabic student, is yelling from the kitchen. Everybody else in the house has no idea what he’s talking about or why he’s so happy. But I do.

Arabic thaalitha students, this is the end of Al-Kitaab. Yeah. It’s weird right? Thursday night I came home from school to open my book and remembered we didn’t have Al-Kitaab homework. Thursday night… or ever again.

Listening tamreens on Hena… Khalas. Al-Qira’a on Ibn Battuta… Khalas. Mofradaat….soooo much mofradaat…khalas.

But after you get over the initial excitement of finally getting through both the books, a bittersweet feeling sets in. For the past 2-3 years of your life, you’ve religiously opened that book, almost every night, to transcribe sentences and circle words you don’t understand (okay, maybe more like a whole paragraph you don’t understand). Every morning you added another coffee (or tear) stain to a page and now your backpack isn’t holding up too well because every day you carried it around like your best friend to school.

And now, after the opening song to the CD has become the tune you walk to and you’ve memorized by heart the order that the listening, reading, and cultural tamreens will appear in each chapter, it’s time to break the nightly waajib traditions you’ve established and move on.

Yeah. It’s weird.

For most of us, (I hope for all of us), this doesn’t mean the end of Arabic. We’re moving on to bigger things. Content courses with the joys of trying to decipher Al-Jazeera news clips. Finally travelling to the Middle East to put all that hard work to use. And maybe, if we’re lucky, even a job that lets us use our Arabic. Our futures are brimming with possibilities. But let us not forget it was Al-Kitaab that laid that Arabic foundation, and according to the rest of the people in the nation trying to learning the language, we got the best right here in good ol’ Texas.

So when you run out of the final on the 12^th with tears of joy streaming down your face and head straight to celebrate with the milkshake or margarita you deserve, you can go ahead and lift the glass to finally finishing the book, Al-Kitaab.

A couple of addendums:

- If you’re still having a little trouble tasting that sweet part of the bittersweet feeling I’m talking about, just give it some time. One day you’ll look back on this book and recall in a way you never could before just how good a friend it was because its binding didn’t fall apart completely until the last week of school.

- And for all the youngins out there just finishing 1st and 2nd year Arabic, there’s hope. I promise. No, really. Don’t cry. You’ll get there soon enough.