Frustrating.

I'm always so depressed and angry with myself after my Arabic speaking appointment.

This is how it goes. My partner and I are the last pair of the week to meet with our graduate student. We step into his room at 4:45 PM every Friday afternoon and it's obvious the poor guy has had enough--eighty American students butchering the Arabic language per week is just about eighty too many. So without speaking to us he leans back in his chair and closes his eyes, not bothering to hide his frustration. It's legitimate frustration, too; I suck on pretty much all fronts when it comes to speaking, and because I know that, I get even worse. Inevitably, my partner slips into Shami and I stumble into fusHa, both of which make our grad student angry (we're supposed to be speaking Masri). We've given up trying to memorize the اولادنا scenes; any more of سعيد and his سرير لوحده and I might just give up on life. So we read the scenes from my paper and then I stutter through the monologue I so carefully prepare, forgetting half of it and mispronouncing the other half due to the fact that I'm insanely nervous and if you asked me to speak in ENGLISH in front of someone who was judging me I might just pass out, let alone do so in Arabic.

I guess the thing that bothers me most, though, is that we never get any positive feedback--or really any recognition at all. Our grad student just closes his eyes and tells us what we've butchered most severely, then asks us for our point sheets (grading is wildly subject to mood) and we get out. I think I'd have a more positive speaking experience if I were asked real questions--I don't expect anyone to remember things about my life, but it'd be nice to have a little personal inquiry once in a while, or at the very least a single positive comment. I get so down on myself about my speaking abilities that I really do think it makes me worse. I'm a person who thrives on verbal recognition--if someone compliments me on even the smallest thing that I do right I feel all right about myself, even if they chew me out for my errors afterward; if instead all they go on about is everything I screw up I just leave feeling horribly, completely incompetent.