First off, I’m not a language expert, and I’m not trained in much of anything linguistic. I just love learning languages (computer and human).
Photo by Ayhan ÇAKAR
I started learning Arabic in April of 2019 at the Pacific Arabic Center, which shutdown permanently once lockdown started for San Francisco. This center, conveniently located in downtown San Francisco, operated for 20 years! Many people were sad to see it go. Now I take private lessons in Arabic.
Arabic is like learning no other language for an English speaker. To understand its challenges (many rewarding), I’ll compare it to my experience learning German in college for two years.
When I learnt German at UCSC, the teachers focused on High German (Hoch Deutsch). What made the language easy for me (and many English speakers) dealt with the many similar words, and similar grammatical structure: subject-verb-object. However, this grammatical structure diverges when tenses are added to German with auxiliary verbs. Here is an example:
Arbeit und leben dürfen nicht miteinander werwechselt werden.
Work and life shouldn’t be confused with each other.
English keeps the verbs close, but German splits them up, and changes the order, e.g. the word for ‘confused’ comes before the word loosely standing in for ‘be.’
When I arrived at a startup in a small Germanic speaking town in the Sarnthaler Alps for work, the first thing I did was introduce myself to the first person I saw. He happened to be a VC guy from Munich. “Er kann Deutsch sprechen,” he said with a smile. I found it easy to order food, make small talk, and make plans for dinner or outings. There was one gotcha. Most people spoke the local Germanic dialect, which I never really learnt, so I was always an outsider that spoke the German of Hanover. There weren’t any university courses in dialect, so I was on the outside until I learnt some dialect. The only close friend I made also spoke English. That said, two years is more than enough time to achieve a functional level of German. I never got fluent, but the German world wasn’t closed to me. There was a surfeit of language resources. German also has a rich literature. I read The Sorrows of Young Werther and The Italian Travels in German.
Compare this with Arabic. It is written the opposite of English, from right to left. It is an abjad, which means the written language (except for the Qur’an and learning materials) removes almost all the vowel sounds. For example, “a new car,” written in abjad would be “a nw cr.” In Arabic, you really have to know the possible words and determine which vowel sound and thus word is meant by the context.
The word order is very flexible, especially in classical Arabic. The verb system is highly complex. There exists a diglossia between the written text, and how it is pronounced. For example, I’ve seen the following pronounced multiple ways:
عندي مو كثير ماء (I don’t have lots of water.)
3ndi mu kteer ma’. (Syrian dialect)
3ndi mish kteer mai. (Lebanese dialect)
(The apostrophe is for a glottal stop, and the 3 is for the Arabic letter ‘ayn which makes a sound that doesn’t exist in English.)
What is interesting is that the word for lots is spelled “katheer” but is pronounced with a T sound, e.g. kteer. This is a phenomena called diglossia, where what is written differs dramatically from what is spoken. Moreover, the sentence doesn’t have a verb in it. There are many grammatically valid sentences without verbs in Arabic, and there is actually a grammatical term for it: joomla ismia (a sentence of names). Wikipedia has a great table showing the variety in spoken and written Arabic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic#Dialects_and_descendants
Many of the varieties of Arabic have very few or no resources at all for the English speaker, for example Tunisian and Sudanese lack basic grammar textbooks for English speakers.
What I what to impress on the reader is that Arabic is complex.
What’s my Arabic so far?
I’ve spent the past 2 years learning fusHa (Modern Standard Arabic). Nobody speaks it, or hears it except when reciting Qur’an or reporting the news. I’ve just started learning dialect. My predicament is almost the same as it was with my German language experience, except that I really can’t do anything yet with my Arabic except order coffee or food at a restaurant. I can take the “root” of a verb, and transform it into any of the verbal forms from form II to form X. An Arabic verb can literally be conjugated in 1000s of ways. Despite that with German, I was way further.
Arabic has all these different dialects as well as code switching from the world’s lingua franca: English. It also has code switching between classical Arabic and dialect similar to how one might have introduced Latin phrases into daily speech during the European Middle Ages.
If 2 years has left me with just basic language speaking, do I regret my slow process?
Not really. I see there’s a push to learn languages as fast as possible. YouTube is full of videos of how someone became fluent in a month in French or Italian, or how someone impressed Korean speakers with only 24 hours of Korean learning. YouTube videos are often a magic trick, which if you understand the slight of hand, you can see what’s up.
Many of these videos focus on rote memorization, excellent pronunciation, and focusing on highly scripted situations. If the situations weren’t so scripted, i.e. focused on finding situations that make the YouTuber shine, I wonder how the YouTuber would do in a more spontaneous setting.
Honestly, anybody can learn language for scripted situations (introductions, shopping, surprise at you knowing their language) in a month or less — as these videos already attest.
Don’t get me wrong. These YouTubers are phenomenal polyglots!
But for me, the magic of a language happens when you are dreaming and feeling in it. Heidegger wrote that Language is the house of Being. One isn’t truly fluent in a language until one feels at home in it.
What’s next?
I’m continuing with my fusHa (Modern Standard Arabic) at QalamSF, and 3amiyah (Levantine Arabic) studies through a private tutor on Preply and another sourced through a friend. This concretely means this reading list for 2021:
The Easy Arabic Reader,
the arabic version of The Little Prince,
The Qur’an (but not straight through, but rather in small excerpts close to the chronological order),
The Travels of Ibn Battuta.
It also means listening to Al Jazeera and BBC Arabic as well as these Arabic speaking Vloggers:
But why did I bother with all this? It’s not enough for me to just travel, and snap a photo. To really understand and connect with a place, knowing the language is essential.
