Learning Juba Arabic

I have been spending a little more time recently learning Juba Arabic. One of the places that I have been practicing and learning new words is at church on Sundays. The sermon is usually preached in Moru and translated into Arabic, but the rhythm of translation gives me a few moments to write down notes of what I have been hearing in Arabic and look things up in a dictionary. Later in the week I can ask someone to help me with the words I have picked up at church. Usually if I listen for repeated words I can get a sense of what the sermon is about especially if I put those key words together with the scripture passages.

Today the Juba Arabic translator spoke really clearly so I picked up quite a few words, but I always smile when I hear a word repeated a lot and then I look it up to get a better idea of topic of the sermon only to find out the word is "of", "and", "then" or some other commonly used word. Today I learned the words for "truth", "fear", and "tiredness", along with a few other words. Right as we were leaving church I also learned how to say "His/her name is _____." My current technique had been to say "My name is _____." while pointing to the person I was introducing.

I am supplementing this sort of informal vocab acquisition strategy with a language learning curriculum with weekly lessons that can applied to any language. My Juba Arabic is still small as I would say here, but it is growing slowly slowly.