أتعلم عربي

For those who may not know, I love language and plan to teach ESL. I have been studying Arabic as a second language.

And to that I say

أنا أحِب ءربي

(I love Arabic!)

In our study of deconstructionists, I found Derrida's theories on the traces of associative meanings extremely interesting in light of learning a second language. As I learn Arabic, I learn it through this process:
The Arabic word for "car" is:

سَيَّارة

Okay. say'yaara is "car"

I am not yet fluent enough to think of Arabic words fast enough to almost simultaneously translate my English thoughts to Arabic words. As I am speaking, I say (in Arabic)

"I am travelling by car."

While in my mind I am thinking in English, 

I am travelling (thankfully Present tense and Present Progressive are the same tense in Arabic). by...oh, what is the word for car?

When I think of any word in Arabic, I associate it with my first language, the English equivalent for that word. I trace words across two languages, and associate my Arabic words to the English constructs I have of those ideas. Maybe when I become fluent in the circles I use Arabic in, I will be able to communicate in Arabic without tracing it to English, even though I will, according to deconstructionism, still be tracing the language through the endless associative meanings.