Summer language courses

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The texts for the summer courses in Arabic and Mandarin have arrived (finally). Those taking these courses can either pick them up from me today before 6pm or wait until the first class, depending on how keen you are. The text for Arabic is An Introduction to Koranic and Classical Arabic by Thackston - it's a good, solid grammar with supplementary readings from the Koran. The Mandarin text is A Practical Chinese Reader by Liu, which is at least a decent start - I've ordered a companion volume for it, but it won't be available for a few weeks.

The classes will both have their first meetings on June 14th - Arabic at 2pm, Mandarin at 3pm, both in room 122. After that they'll be held twice a week, three hours at a time. We can come to an agreement as to what days/times would be best for everyone at the organizational meetings. Because we're only meeting twice a week (in order to allow for flexibility in vacation-time and so forth), you'll be expected to do a fair amount of conversational practice on your own time, as well as the usual grammar/translation exercises. So you need to find yourself a 'buddy' - if you want to do that ahead of time because a friend is taking the class, go ahead, but if not, we can pair people up at the organizational meetings. We might have to have a couple of trios, depending on what the final numbers are.

You can email me with any questions - Moira and I will be taking the laptops to Santorini, silly people that we are - and hey, if anyone wants to sign up for either and hasn't talked to me yet, that's fine, too. Ordered extra textbooks and all. Likewise, if you want to take either or both of the courses but aren't going to be here that first week, email me. There are at least a couple of people in that situation that I know of already, so it should be easy to get you all caught up together.