Small Victories

One looks like a bird. Another resembles a wiggly snake with a long tail. Some look like lacy edging, with dots above and below a row of scalloped half-moon shapes.

Slowly, these bits of Arabic writing are beginning to look like words to me. Yesterday, I recognized a word on one page in my textbook that I had seen and written three pages before. When I turned back to that page to check, I found that I was correct. I had recognized a word written in Arabic! What had all been completely nonsensical scribbles just three weeks ago were now beginning to take shape as ordered communication.

And this has started me really thinking about the arbitrary nature of all writing systems.

Why do our Latin alphabet characters look the way they do and not some other way? Why are some of the characters in, say, the Cyrillic alphabet so strange to our American eyes? How is it that we have come to associate certain sounds with certain written characters? And who came up with these systems of written representation?

I remember learning about the phonetic alphabet that linguists use to represent spoken dialects. Some of my classmates thought it was confusing to learn different characters for each and every possible uttered sound, but I found it refreshingly simple. There was no confusion about how to pronounce a string of those characters. Each one stood for one, and only one, sound. It had nothing at all to do with spelling; maybe that's why my fellow students were confused. Maybe they had internalized their English teachers' admonishments about correct spelling too assiduously, and found the phonetic markers too rudimentary. But these characters are about sounds, not spelling. The way a word sounds, especially in English, does not always have anything at all to do with how it is spell.

For instance: psychology, pleasure, mention, debt, mnemonic, pterodactyl, paradigm.

All of those words have silent letters in them, making them a minefield for new English learners. And how to explain the two ways 'live' can be pronounced? (I live in a big house vs. we saw a great live show last week.)

Arabic has no silent letters. That seems kind of nice, until you have to insert a breathy 'h' right after or before another consonant in the middle of a word. Try it. It's harder than you would think.

And there's this 'khaah' letter, represented in writing by an elaborate, rounded sort of capital T that loops below the line and is dotted underneath. It looks quite elegant, but is super hard for me to pronounce.

It’s something like the 'ch' sound at the end of Bach and the Scottish pronunciation of 'loch.' It's a bit similar to how some of the French pronounce their 'r' sounds, but more like how Germans pronounce almost all of their words: a rough, unvoiced scraping of the back of the tongue against the soft palate.

Like you're trying to clear your throat or call up a loogie.

I almost spit on my classmates whenever we practice words containing this sound in class.

So far, that's the most difficult of the sounds for me. Except for maybe the two 'h' sounds. Arabic allows for a sort of soft 'h' (like in 'hand') and a hard 'h'. But I can't really hear the difference, so it's not easy for me to represent it. One of my classmates, who is from Palestine, told me to "just push on it a little harder." I didn't really know what she meant, but when I tried it again, she said it was better.

The book describes it as "the sound you make when you breathe on glass to fog it up."

But every time I try to differentiate between this 'hard h', the softer 'h', and the 'khaah' sound, my throat practically locks up, my tongue gets tangled, and I run out of all saliva. These sounds require spit! I'm stuck between a desire to maintain social graces (i.e. not spitting on people) and a desire to pronounce Arabic words correctly.

I had no idea a new language would be this much of a physical challenge.

When I mentioned to Eihab that I was having some difficulty getting these three sounds figured out, he answered with something of a non sequitur.

"There are four components to learning language," he said. "Reading, writing, speaking, and listening. You may not be as strong in all of them."

I'm no stranger to the components of language learning, but I wasn't terribly satisfied with that answer.

At least he had praised my handwriting earlier in the day, so I know I'm doing something right. Now I shall go and practice writing those birds and snakes and lacy scallops.

Small victories are what will keep me going in this class.

The Syndrome

"Did he say 'hadre-TIK' or did he say 'hadre-TEK'?" Eihab asked after one of the male students in my class tried to reproduce something a character in a short video had said.

"A brief silence hung in the room, and then several of us chorused, "'Hadre-TEK'!"

"Oh did he?" Eihab halted in his path through the row of tables, looking around with raised eyebrows.

I had chorused back the feminine pronunciation with my classmates, but I honestly couldn't be sure. Discerning the nuances of these most foreign syllables was often a crap shoot. Most of the conversations we had listened to so far were a jumble of nonsense for the first few tries. Only after repeating single words ten or fifteen times, seeing them written in Latin characters, and hearing Eihab articulate them slowly for us could we even begin to recognize the beginnings and ends of words in the vignettes he showed us.

"It is called 'Learning Arabic Syndrome,'" he said, continuing on his route through the tables. "You're going to see things that aren't there and hear things that don't exist. It's normal. Don't worry about it."

He's right. The very brief exposure we've had so far to the sounds and characters of the Arabic language has tricked us to some extent. Our little brains are trying desperately to link these new sights and sounds to something we already know. Often, the newness of them works like a force-field, making them bounce off our old knowledge and defy memory. They are so new and foreign that our minds simply cannot understand them or hold onto them for any length of time.

This is why Eihab's mantra is 'once is not enough.' The repetition will eventually imprint the sounds and characters into new pathways of memory, but it takes diligence. And time.

I had a student Wednesday afternoon who told me he wanted to check the grammar in his short essay because his first language is not English.

"What is your first language?" I asked, not wanting to assume from his olive skin, dark hair, and thick accent.

"Arabic," he said.

"Ahlan wa sahlan," I said with almost no hesitation.

"Ahlan!" he replied, briefly touching his hand to his chest and bowing slightly. "Thank you!"

The rest of our session went exceedingly well—as in textbook perfect well. I pointed out that he seemed to have difficulty with when to use definite articles, as well as when to use a 'to be' helping verb with a progressive tense.

"I know this is tough because there are no articles and no 'to be' verb in Arabic; isn't that right?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. A brief explanation of both grammatical points seemed to make sense to him, and we ended our session on a very positive note.

I felt I had made something of a cultural break-through. Not only could I help him with English grammar, but I could reach out to him in his own native tongue, if only with an informal greeting. And then I was able to offer some empathy about the difficulty of learning English.

And suddenly I felt like my super-power really was language.

When I worked at a coffee shop during my undergrad studies, the philosophy major I often worked with would often pass the time by playing 'what would your super power be?' with the customers. I always wanted to have the ability to learn any and every language perfectly just by listening to it. Or to have one of those gizmos from The Matrix that you could plug into your brainstem and simply upload a new language into your cerebral cortex and instantly speak it perfectly.

The class I'm taking isn’t working that quickly, but it is working. I can identify individual letters in a line of Arabic script, and I can sometimes pick out several individual words when we watch a video of Arabic conversation.

I do, however, often go completely blank when Eihab asks me something in class, something I have repeated several times already. And if I don't study the textbook a little bit every day, the script begins to look like squiggly lines of nonsense.

But that's just my Syndrome playing tricks on me. I won't worry about it.

Once is Not Enough

Assalaamu calaykum.

I've heard this phrase a lot in movies and on TV, but I never knew what it meant until now. Nor did I know how to correctly pronounce it until now.

After two days of Arabic 101, I can greet a person in a variety of ways, including a casual "hi" and the aforementioned more formal Islamic greeting; introduce myself by name; tell where I am from; express pleasure in meeting someone; and say thank you. All of this I can articulate in clumsy, deeply accented Arabic.

Our professor, Eihab ("EE-haab"), is from Egypt and is very enthusiastic about teaching us his native tongue. From the moment our 90-minute class begins at 9:55 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Eihab moves constantly. He paces back and forth in the space at the bottom of our graduated rows of tables and chairs, flapping his arms and gesticulating with his hands as he repeats pronunciation of phonetics that are quite foreign to our Midwest palates. He often ventures up into the rows of tables, selecting a student by pointing at her and intoning a greeting or vocabulary word to be repeated, then leaning close to hear and evaluate her response. He also darts frequently to his Mac, connected to the room's AV system on a tall metal cart to the right of the projector screen pulled down in front of an old-fashioned green chalk board, to click on an icon from the textbook's companion website. Images of native Arabic speakers greeting us from Tunisia or Sudan animate on the screen as we all lean forward a bit and strain to understand the alien sounds they make.

When Eihab went through all 28 phonetic sounds of the Arabic alphabet on our first day, he gave the impression of an orchestra director. Standing slightly sideways in front of the big white screen with the written characters displayed in four columns of seven, he pointed to one at a time with his right hand and vocalized it in deep, richly accented tones.

"Ehh! Eh!" he sang, pointing to the aleph, "Beh! Beh," pointing to the next one.

Meanwhile, his left arm swirled rhythmically down, toward his midsection, up along his sternum, and out toward us, palm up and fingers elegantly splayed. That left hand circled down and up, inward and outward, over and over, as if indicating the breath his diaphragm pushed into his lungs and through his vocal chords to emit the sounds we dutifully repeated.

Occasionally, he interjected comments or encouragement between phonetic syllables.

"Oh, you're going to like this one!" "This one is easy!" "Montaztic!"

That last one, he told us, is Arabic for fantastic, and he exclaimed it almost every time one or all of us succeeded in reproducing a sound or phrase. He is also quite fond of high-fives.

I haven't been in a classroom as a student in a year and a half. And the past three months were almost completely idle for me. Oh, sure, I dabbled in acrylic painting and read a lot of books and did some gardening and housework and such. But from the middle of May until this week, the first of September, I did exactly nothing of a sustained, challenging intellectual nature.

I swear, these last two weeks, I could actually feel my brain atrophying.

So it was particularly invigorating to begin my foray back into mental stimulation with such an energetic and enthusiastic professor. The other students—almost a dozen young men and about eight young women (and they are all much, much younger than I am)—all seem quite engaged in Eihab's electricity. Indeed, there is simply no way a person could be idle or bored or discretely distracted by a cell phone in Eihab's class. He had us out of our seats and greeting each other in Arabic within twenty minutes of the start of our first class.

"Once is not enough," he reminds us, as we try formal and informal greetings, helping each other to sort out the sticky vowel and consonant sounds we stumble over. He sings to us a portion of a phrase, and we chorus it back to him in a call-and-response that rises and falls with his balletic arm movements.

By the time class ends, I am jazzed and buzzed with the excitement of learning. I believe I can feel new pathways forging in my gray matter.

I have several reasons for taking this class.

First, the university pays for it, so it effectively raises my total compensation. And what kind of crazy person would not collect some part of her paycheck?

Second, I have read that active language learning stimulates the brain in key ways that may stave off diseases like Alzheimer's and actually improve memory and thinking skills. The migraines I experience are said to signal increased risk for dementia, so I figure this could be at least a balance to that, if not a corrective.

Third, since completing my graduate program, I have felt increasingly removed from the academic mindset and schedule. I hope that taking this class will keep me tuned-in to the semester cycle and re-activate those organizational skills that helped me succeed as both an undergraduate and graduate student: time management, discipline, perseverance.

Fourth, a lot of the students who come to me for tutoring are Arabic-speaking, so I'm hoping more familiarity of how Arabic works will help me understand the mistakes these students make in English, and maybe help me help them do better.

An unexpected fifth reason: Eihab's class is fun!

I had forgotten how pleasurable it is to begin to absorb a new language. Our latest trip to France in late spring pretty much humbled me, as I had let my speaking and listening skills atrophy. And when language skills are not practiced regularly, they quickly dissipate.

The ESOL class I was volunteering in has disbanded, so this Arabic class is also a stand-in for all that great cultural and linguistic interaction. This time, though, I am the student and not the teacher, and that feels particularly comfortable. I've missed being a student: clear deadlines and assignments, regular evaluations, concrete measures of success and failure.

I had thought at the beginning of the summer that my time as a student was over, that I was moving into the realm of full-time, grown-up worker bee. That, however, did not come to pass. The whispy promise of a full-time position for me fell victim to the now-infamous budget cuts that our entire university community is still reeling from.

The Arabic class and this blog are my way of making lemonade then. I am returning to the two things in which I have had unequivocal success: being a student and writing.

When I get frustrated or down about my circumstance, I need only listen to my professor's melodic advice: Once is not enough.