According to the State Department, I became fluent in Arabic two months ago. Yesterday, I accidentally convinced the first Saudi that I was Lebanese based on my language ability. But four months into working at the State Department I feel like I’m spinning my wheels and at best not losing ground with Arabic.

It could be that work occupies so much time and Arabic is a jealous mistress. I’m used to spending 50 hour weeks studying Arabic like I did in January. Now, those 50 hours go to the embassy, and I’m lucky if I study an hour a day.  Even though I’m using Arabic in interviews, I can’t push the boundaries of my knowledge like I did with intense study. Since coming to Riyadh, I’ve struggled to even review vocab for 15 minutes a day. So, I’m starting to forget vocab that I learned while in Damascus in May. Also disheartening, I have not finished a single book since coming to Riyadh a month ago compared to 5 for my three months in living in DC.

Also, the sense of success from passing an Arabic test for pay bonus has faded into pessimism about future progress. The State Department’s language institute always emphasizes that deep knowledge of a language takes orders of magnitude more time than superficial understanding. On average, progressing each additional level on the ILR scale takes as long as the combined time spent studying the language so far. So according to State guidelines, if it takes 3040 hours to go from nothing to a 3/3, it will take another 3040 hours to go from here to a 4/4. If I were to view the problem purely in terms of vocabulary, gaining appreciably more understanding of the language means learning thousands more obscure words, rather than hundreds. The good news is that I have a year in Saudi Arabia to absorb as much Arabic as I can. The bad news is that the path of learning has shifted from a sprint to a marathon.