ARAB 2020

Before taking this class, I had heard a lot of bad things about Suad. Nevertheless, I am happy to say that I was proven wrong. She is wonderful, caring, and most importantly, an amazing teacher. Although she has high expectations, it is not impossible to get a good grade. As long as you show up to class and put in effort, you will get a good grade.

Suad is a mom as much as she is a teacher. She tries to involve every student and doesn't pressure you to be this sort of perfect student. She makes time for students and does her best to level up your arabic trying the culture of the arab sphere with the language. However, she'll be able to recognize when you aren't putting in effort into the class and has this tough love attitude in pushing her students. With that in mind, her 30+ years of experience as a language educator really shows as she'll be able to answer and tie connections to concepts absent of the textbook. In fact, she's taught from dozens of textbooks and is the one who chooses them for the department! She'll actually know for a fact what words you do and don't know which is really cool as the student.

Some downsides is that she isn't familiar with zoom in case the class moves to remote, so those classes are dull. Also, she spends a lot of time exploring language learning (e.g., working through activities) rather than fleshing out grammar rules, so grammar quizzes/exam portions can get tough. She absolutely will spend a class going over every single grammar rule, but will move on quickly and not review it past that before the exam. The point is, much of the % of the classes leading up to the exam might not be spent in a way that'd improve your performance in the exam rather your fluency of the language itself. That said, practice makes perfect. Reviewing the textbook on your own time over and over and practicing written examples with LLM's works like a charm.

Tl;dr Great professor! She's who you want to go with if you want to leave UVA with the most comprehensive understanding of the Arabic language.