Learning Arabic: My New Life as a Kindergartener.
After I stumbled
onto the notion of learning Arabic, I found myself telling people, “I already
speak Spanish and I am pretty good at learning languages. Arabic can’t be that
hard.” I had no idea what I was talking about, learning a new language is really hard. It is clear to me now that
I had totally forgotten how much of a bummer it was to learn Spanish. It took
me four years of struggling through high school, two years of feeling
outclassed in college, and a year abroad in Spain to reach a level of semi-fluency.
And now I am in Cairo, cramming my head full of hard to pronounce words and
peculiar sentence structures. Arabic is haunting me. All too often I become
aware that I have, for the last hour, been, unconscious, muttering an
eclectic blend of miscellaneous words and overheard phrases that I do not
understand. This rambling affliction is persistent, but my teachers have
made it clear that this is “a normal part of the learning process.” Their
reassurances are unnerving and suspicious.
My efforts to
learn Arabic have landed me in an interesting situation. I had imagined after
the first month I would be thumbing through novels and talking politics over
coffee and shisha. This is not the case. During the first two weeks of Arabic
class, I was transformed from a twenty-four year old college graduate into a
kindergartener. I spent my days learning the ABCs, and writing from right to
left. The only difference between elementary Arabic class and kindergarten
is sleep deprivation.
The Arabic alphabet
has twenty-eight letters, three of which are vowels, and a glottal stop. Many
of the letter sounds, especially the vowels, are essentially identical, and, depending
on the accent of the speaker, virtually indistinguishable. There
are also a couple of sounds that are unique to the Arabic language. Because they do not exist
outside of the language, they are very hard for me to accurately reproduce. I
have spent a lot of time repeatedly butchering these letter sounds.
Even though the
alphabet consists of twenty-eight letters, there are only a handful of
letterforms. The number and placement of its corresponding dots make each
letter distinguishable. When written hastily or in short hand, all clarity is
lost, disaster strikes, and frustration ensues. Thus, reading and writing in
Arabic challenging. I still struggle to read out loud in English, and I can’t say
it is any easier to do in Arabic. I do, however, find solace knowing that my
classmates can’t do it either. At least now I am able to hide my reading deficiencies behind the guise of a foreign language.
The teachers, though
very intelligent, do not have the strongest command of the English language.
Consequentially, a poorly articulated explanation can plunge the class into
mass confusion. This ‘lost in translation’ phenomenon goes both ways, which
makes asking a question can be a pretty harrowing endeavor and reliably produces
either a confusing tangent or a vaguely condescending answer. For example, when asking for clarification on
how to accurately predict a letter sound, given the multitude of possibilities,
“you just have to know,” is the most common response. It appears that this response
can be used to explain any of the numerous peculiarities and inconsistencies of
Arabic. It is utilized with enough regularity that I just assume it some sort
of panacea for complex and linguistic concepts. So even though the majority of
the class is taught in English, miscommunication abounds.
Academically, I
consider myself to be moderately accomplished. I have completed four years of
university and have a degree to show for it. Unfortunately, this means nothing
now that I am studying Arabic. Actually, it complicates the whole ordeal. I am
finding that if I do not understand what is being taught I become defensive and
think to myself, “this is beneath me for I have a degree… in Medieval Spanish
history.” Moments later, I sheepishly return my attentions to the lesson,
muster up all of my courage, and say, “Sorry…I am completely confused.” The thousand
mile stares and mechanical nods of my classmates let me know that I am not the
only one. I must admit, nothing reassures me more than knowing everyone else is
just as perplexed as I am.
To be continued…
