The Scrabble Bully learns Arabic

Arabic class is going very well.  It is hilarious to be in there learning the Arabic equivalent of the ABC song, though.  My impression of Arabic as a nice, orderly language, relative to English, still seems to hold true.  Granted, pretty much every language is nice and orderly compared to English.

Although I'm not nearly there yet, I am starting to see how words written in Arabic make sense.  I can see how I'll be able to decipher them someday.

The last time I did something like this was when I studied to become a Scrabble bully.  This is an episode of family lore that most people consider best forgotten.

My father is very verbal.  I probably inherited that trait from him.  His father before him was a crossword puzzle whiz.  It's something that runs in our family. 

He loved to play Scrabble.  If a few family members were around he'd hustle up a game.  I'd never seen the game until a few years ago when he showed me how to play. 

I had heard about Stephen Fatsis' book, "Word Freak" that detailed the sordid world of championship Scrabble.  Something few people know is that there is a bona-fide, step-by-step method for getting better at the game.  Just like there's Suzuki method for violin, there's a set of steps you can use to take yourself from being an everyday hobbyist in Scrabble to being a tournament level player.

So, after reading the book, I bought another book called "Everything Scrabble" by Scrabble champion Joe Edley.  He spells out the method.  I followed it.

Things like, for instance, memorizing the list of playable 2 letter words reminds me a lot of, for instance, memorizing the Arabic alphabet.  There aren't a lot of ways to do it, and for me, the way that works best is just to take a pad of paper and a pen and write the list over and over again until it's committed to memory.

I didn't complete the entire method.  Just enough that I felt I was good enough to beat my Dad.

I kept it a secret.  My big mouth sister in law told him in advance, but apparently, he was entirely too dismissive of my Scrabble Jedi training and when we met again, he asked if I'd like to play.

My intention was to get consistently better than him, but to still make it fun and challenging.  Sort of like bringing a bigger pillow to a pillow fight.

The actual result?  It was more like bringing a shotgun to a pillow fight.

I was regularly beating him by scores like 400 to 50.  Where, in the past, nobody had really ever played a bingo word (using the entire rack), I was throwing down 2 or 3 per game.  It was an utter annihilation.

We tried everything.  Me spotting him a few hundred points, whatever.  Didn't matter.  I had become a Scrabble bully.

I digress.  Learning Arabic reminds me of those days of memorizing things for Scrabble.  I'm optimistic because our instructor seems to indicate that students can function somewhat in the language, even after just 2 or 3 semesters.  I don't know how long I'll be able to study this, but chances are that when I'm done, I will be going somewhere where I can immerse myself in the language for the most part.  I just want a solid foundation to build on.  Without that, it's too hard, even with immersion, to gain any proficiency.