العربية - أسبوع 4

These last couple of weeks have been very bad for my studying.  I still am getting some time in every day, which is the most important thing, but it is not as much time as I would like.  I have had a couple of large setbacks lately which annoy me to no end.  I have tried to obtain both the Advanced course of Michel Thomas' Arabic program and also the audio which goes along with a couple of my texts, but to no avail.  Miraculously all of these were unobtainable from my library.  This being the case, I currently have no audio to work from with the exception of one set of audio from one text, and the audio on that is not terribly helpful.  I am finally getting into verbs in my current textbook!  The first half of the text dealt with the alphabet and noun cases, which is all well and good, however it makes it difficult to practice any writing on my own when missing that crucial V is the SVO spectrum.  I am going to be assessing myself on the 30th of this month to see my progress thus far.  Also, this will give me an idea of what I need to work on next month more intensively.

I had my lesson with JRL last Friday and it was marvelous!  So many more things became clear through the course of the lesson and I was actually singing tenor notes and not feeling like I was dying.  Since my lesson I have been routinely warming up to F above high C and singing feels really good.  The biggest concept I took away from my lesson was that I had the wrong aural image in my head for my voice, specifically for high notes.  My plan now is to work my tail off over the next couple of months and see JRL when he is back stateside, which I believe is going to be in April.

I thought that I would post a couple of clips of me on here to show my progress for anyone who is interested.  The first clip is from July 2010 and was the last baritone aria I sang:

The next clip is from this past Monday, 6 months since the previous clip.  I am well aware that this is not nearly a finished product, but I found it rather encouraging.  This is a considerably shorter clip than the previous one, but I believe that this is a decent example of what JRL refers to as the "small voice" which will ultimately grow into a full voice sound:

For the sake of honesty:  Both of these clips were recorded using my cell phone and are thus missing some fundamental harmonics that would be present in real life.