Around this same time, Dipendra headed to Nepal (or so I thought) for a conference on migrant workers’ rights and to see his family, so there was no copy editing or prison visits to do.
I decided that now might be a good time to take an Arabic language class. I signed up for 2 months of classes at a language school in the neighborhood where we live. The class would be held every day, five days a week for 2 to 3 hours a day. I let the school know that I was a beginner with absolutely no prior experience in speaking or writing Arabic. The woman who runs the school told me I would start off with a week of just learning to read and write the Arabic alphabet (or Alif Baa as it’s called in Arabic) in a one-on-one session with my instructor and then the following week I would be joined by two other people who were also beginners with no prior Arabic. Great, I thought and off I went to start my class.
To give you a little bit of background, the Classical Arabic language evolved out of a number of ancient Arabian languages between the third century BC and the fourth century AD. It eventually spread throughout the Middle Eastern region, North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula with the expansion of the Islamic Empire. You may have heard people refer to the numbers currently used in the western world as “Arabic” numbers (1,2,3,4,etc). The reason for this is that these numbers came into Europe via the Maghreb or current day Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia through Islamic Spain and were considered “Western Arabic numbers”. The “Eastern” Arabic numbers used in the Middle East are different than those. In Lebanon, both sets of numbers are commonly used.
Classical Arabic is usually only spoken when reading religious texts, such as the Quran or the Bible. Modern Standard Arabic is the modern, formal language of Arabic print, newspapers and politics. It is the language spoken on television by most news reporters and by most politicians giving speeches. It is also the written language that all Arabic speakers use regardless of dialect. But in everyday life, colloquial Arabic is mainly used. And that means that there are a number of different colloquial Arabic varieties being used throughout the region. Some of them are very similar like that between Lebanon and Syria. Some are slightly different and would be a little more difficult for two people from different areas to have a conversation, like Lebanon and Egypt. And some, like Lebanon and Morocco, are mutually unintelligible and people would not be able to have a conversation.
Arabic script reads from right to left and is very “cursive” in form and calligraphy is an important part of the language’s culture. The following are excerpts from both the Quran and the Bible:
The Arabic language is related to the other Semitic languages of the region including Hebrew and Aramaic. The term “Semitic” refers to members of any of the various ancient and modern Semitic-speaking peoples originating in the Near East and Northern Africa, including Akkadians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Arabs, and Ethiopian Semites. The term Semitic became associated with the Hebrew language and culture in Europe in the late 18th century and the term “Anti-Semitic” was coined by a German journalist in reference to European Jews in the late 19th century. Aramaic is still spoken in some isolated communities in Syria. Amy and I had the opportunity to hear it spoken in the village of Maalula, Syria at what is considered to be one of the oldest Christian churches in the world and was dated to around the year 325AD. The church still has a pre-Christian pagan, horseshoe shaped alter in it.
It is important to note that the word “Allah” just means “God” in Arabic, not “God of Islam”. The name “Allah” refers to the same monotheistic God that all Jews, Christians and Muslims worship. When Christians who speak Arabic (and there are many of them here making up about 35% of the population of Lebanon) are referring to their God, they say “Allah”. Unfortunately, the western world often misinterprets this and frames God and Allah as two different things. They are, in fact, referring to the same thing, just in different languages. It would be the same as a Christian in South America or Spain calling God “Dios”.My first week of class went really well. It was exciting to learn a new language, or at least the alphabet, and I was really getting into it. My teacher, Vivian, who was Syrian and married to a Lebanese man, was really nice and patient. Four years ago she could not speak a word of English, but learned from many of the English speaking students she taught. Vivian and I got along very well and also had something in common: bad backs. Mine, a torn disc from a park service work injury and hers, a fractured vertebrae from a fall down a flight of stairs. Each day I brought my lumbar pillow and she wore a giant back brace. She was due to have surgery in December.
I was going to class for 2 or 3 hours a day and studying for about two hours a night at home. It was a ton of memorization, but I liked it. There’s something really neat about listening to the neighborhood mosque’s call to prayer while you’re studying Arabic. It really sets the mood.
The second week of class didn’t go as well. I showed up for class and was introduced to my two new classmates. One was a guy from Spain who was of Lebanese decent who had had a year and a half of Modern Standard Arabic in College and now lived with his Arabic speaking cousins in Beirut. The other was a young Dutch woman who had just finished a two month course in Arabic in Damascus, Syria. At what point these two folks were considered beginners is beyond me. Needless to say they were more advanced than I was and wanted the class to go at a pace faster than I could keep up with. They also did not want to follow the set curriculum for the class and wanted to jump around. Vivian, the teacher, to her credit, tried to rein them in and continually told them we needed to cover things in order and go at a slower pace. I complained to the woman who owned the school but she stated that if I wanted to change classes I would have to pay double tuition. I was pissed. So, instead, I would have to constantly ask them to slow down, but it did no good. In order to keep up with the pace I was now studying 5 to 6 hours a night at home. My head felt like it was going to pop. There were now large gaps in what I was learning since we were jumping around so much. Vivian would later confide in me that she had asked the woman who owned and ran the school to put me in a different class but the owner said no because it would mean the school wouldn’t make as much profit off of me. Every day I would come home and consider quitting, not caring that I would lose all my tuition money, which wasn’t cheap. I decided to stick it out and would end up being in the class with these two other students for a month. When the month finished up I told the owner I wanted a different class and didn’t want my former classmates in it.
She finally listened and I was back to the original arrangement of just me and Vivian. Things went a lot smoother for the second month, but it was mostly review of the first month since we had skimmed over so much. I felt like I had wasted a month of my time and money and now I had a bad attitude about the classes. Vivian told me she was surprised that I hadn’t quit. It made me feel a bit better knowing that it wasn’t my fault. All in all though, I did pick up some of the language that I am able to use on a daily basis.
Aside from all the trouble I’ve had, I must say that Arabic is a very difficult language to learn, especially for a native English speaker. There are several reasons, I feel, that this is so. To start with, there are 28 letters and 14 vocalizations marks that serve as accents or vowels. There are a handful of these letters that are sounds not made in Romantic or Germanic languages like English. These sounds are made in the back of the throat with a slight gargle sound. The closest representation I can give for this in writing is the sounds GH, KH or AH with a gargle. These letters sounds are completely foreign to us and in order to pronounce them, the native English speaker ends up contorting his face in some very strange and embarrassing positions, not to mention the whole flying phlegm thing.
Another difficult thing about Arabic letters is that their form changes depending on where in the word the letter falls or if it is standing alone. So the shape of one letter changes depending on whether the letter is at the beginning, middle or end of a word or if standing alone. Imagine having 4 different forms for each letter of the alphabet! That basically increases the alphabet to 112. Here's an example of the 4 different forms for one letter:
Also, many of the different letters look very similar. These are all different letters that look alike:
And several letters make, what sounds like to a non-Arabic speaker, the same sound. There are 2 letters that make a "T" sound, 3 that make a "Th" sound, 2 that make a "D" sound and 2 that make an "S" sound:
And one word can mean many different things, like the word “alaa” which can mean “to”, “at”, “on” or “up”. Or “aa” which can mean “to”, “at”, “on” or “in” depending on the context it’s used in. Confused yet?But the hardest thing for me was the massive amount of conjugation that takes place in Arabic, not only in verbs but in nouns as well. So, for instance, in English we would say “my bike”, “your bike”, “his bike”, etc. In Arabic, the word “bike” would conjugate to represent the 8 different pronouns it could be used with. So, that means learning 8 different words per noun.
For verbs in English, we usually conjugate between singular and plural by adding an “S” to the end of the word. As in, “Jack runs,” and “Jack and Jill run.” In Arabic, the word conjugates differently for each pronoun it could be referring to and the conjugation takes place as a prefix, added to the beginning of the verb, not added to the end of the word. In other words, every verb has 2 or 3 different letters added to the beginning of it to show whether you are saying, “I run”, “he runs” or “we run.” And since the letters are added to the beginning of the word (most of which begin with ‘B’), there are 8 different versions of every verb you need to memorize. And this doesn’t include exceptions to the rule. For example, instead of just learning to say “run” or “runs”, it would be like having to learn “I berun, you bitrun (male), you bitrunee(female), he beerun, she bitrun (same as you-male), we mnrun, you bitrunoo (plural), they beerunoo”. This of course means that in a sentence, every single verb now starts with a “B” sound. Did I mention that along with adding this prefix to the verb, it changes the sound of the first vowel in every verb with no consistent pattern? Pretend I never said that. Here’s the Arabic word for the verb “to come” being conjugated. 8 versions of the same word!:
I can go on. The plural form of a word is usually not like the singular form. For instance, instead of “car” and “cars”, it would be “car” and “carrahat” and there is no rule to follow, it’s complete memorization. Did I mention that Arabic has different forms for singular, two and then plural? Yes it does. Here’s the transliteration for singular, two and plural of the Arabic word for “Chair”: Kersee, Kerstein, Karahsee. Here it is for “boy”: Ibn, Ibnein, WlAd. Do you feel the madness setting in yet?Before I started this class, I asked around about where the best place to study Arabic would be. Everyone told me to go to Syria because I would be forced to speak Arabic there since not that many people speak English. They were right. When I went to Ecuador a few years ago to study Spanish, I learned more in 2 weeks of an immersion class than I did in 3 years of high school.
Here’s some of my homework:
A problem with studying Arabic in Lebanon isn’t just that many people here speak English, it’s that most people don’t want to speak Arabic to you. They’ll speak it amongst themselves but won’t take the time to let you practice. There’s also a class/status thing with people and English here. In Beirut, Arabic is the language of the commoners and people want to show you that they speak French or English, no matter how bad their English is. Vivian, who was raised in Syria in a home that spoke Arabic and French (the French colonized Syria and Lebanon, so many people here are fluent in it) told me that she does not have her children speak Arabic at home; she’s sending them to a French elementary school and only speaks French to them at home. Many people in Beirut make it a point to tell you that they were educated at a “French” private school and not the lower class public schools that teach in Arabic. It’s very sad to me. I saw the same thing in India where people were willing to dilute their culture and language to try to be what they felt was from a higher class. In India and Lebanon, speaking English is a status symbol.Over Christmas break, Amy and I traveled to Syria and I was able to practice my Arabic more in one week there than I was able to do in 2 months in Beirut. (More on that trip later).
I know it seems like I’m doing a lot of bad mouthing about Arabic but don’t get me wrong, there are some really beautiful and interesting things about the language. One is that there are so many different ways of greeting someone and saying good-bye. Courtesy is built in to the language and you will hear people on the street spending a few minutes just running through the niceties of greeting each other. It makes just saying “Hello” seem cold and boring. Especially when most of the greetings and salutations involve wishing good health and peace upon the person you’re speaking to. Even saying “please” to someone is extremely courteous in Arabic. It’s actually 3 words and translates to “It might be a good thing if you…” as if expressing fear of insulting the person you are asking something of.
Another interesting thing is the number of greeting responses that involve God. If someone says something like, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” The response is “Inshallah” which means “If God wills it.” Or “Il Hamdilla” which means “I will, thanks to God.”
One of the phrases I find touching is a phrase you can say after doing something you enjoyed with a friend, like having coffee. One person will say something like “it was nice seeing you.” And you can respond by saying, “Daman Insha Allah” or “Let’s do this forever, God willing.” My friend Steve attended a funeral here in Beirut and was sipping coffee with one of the family members when the family member said “It was nice to see you.” And Steve politely replied in Arabic, “Let’s do this forever, God willing.” The family member kindly informed Steve that the one place you don’t use that phrase is at a funeral!
A nice one is when someone says, “Good Morning” or “How is your morning?” The response is “Sabaah Il Warid” or “my morning is as good as the white flower.” And my favorite of all is something people say to you after you get a haircut, “Nyma!” which translates to “Happy Haircut!” What could be better than that?!!
Well, my second month of classes would pass bringing in the month of December. Vivian would have her back surgery and be out of commission for a couple of months. I figured that this was a good time to take a break from Arabic classes and try to soak in all I had learned. I told Vivian that I would start back up again after she recovered and was back teaching. I figured she’d be laid up for 3 or 4 months. To my surprise, I got a call from the school at the beginning of February telling me that Vivian was back and wanted to schedule my classes for the month. I felt myself starting to sweat. I told them I was busy with work for February and would contact them in March. I still haven’t decided whether I will go back or not. But, in the meantime, Dipendra would contact me and soon my schedule would be all booked up….
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