Pronouncing Arabic Properly
One early hurdle you’ll face when learning Arabic is figuring out how to correctly pronounce words and make the sounds of letters not shared with the English alphabet. It can be challenging to learn how to say letters like “qaf” or “ghain,” but it’s very important that you learn. In English, a letter can be dropped from a word or pronounced wrong and it likely won’t affect the meaning of the sentence. In Arabic, each word is made up of a three-letter root placed into a pattern. If one of the letters is pronounced incorrectly, a sympathetic listener may be able to understand you, but the average person will just be confused, because the meaning of the entire word will be different.
There are a few things you can do to help you learn the sounds quickly and correctly. A good first step is to get to know your mouth, nose, and throat very, very well. Think of this exercise as a warm-up before your workout. Open and close your throat, hum and click, move your tongue around, feel where your teeth are. Your mouth and your vocal cords are your instrument, and you should be familiar with them in a conscious way as you learn to shape new sounds. Once you do this, practice saying the letters aloud, repeating them until you have made the correct noise. If you like, write them as you say them, and you will also be able to practice learning the Arabic script. After some time making these noises, the muscles associated with making them will get stronger, and it will feel more natural to use them.
Another thing you can do to familiarize yourself with the sounds of Arabic is to listen to people speaking or singing. You can find plenty of Arabic music, movies, newscasts, poetry performances, and other materials online. When you listen, try to relax your mind and just hear the sounds clearly and accurately. Try to find the spots in your own mouth that allow you to make those sounds. Don’t worry about understanding--in this way, if you do understand a word it will be natural, and if you don’t, you will still be familiarizing yourself with the way Arabic should sound.
If you want to take it further than simply sounds, you can try to pick up on the rhythm of how people speak, on the different ways of expressing tone or mood, and even on hand gestures. The purpose of this is to think of Arabic as a real way of communicating with people, and not just something you use in the classroom.
People often feel they sound silly or they may have anxiety about being wrong when learning these new sounds and letters. As you practice producing these sounds, try to not be intimidated and don’t be embarrassed if it takes you time to get it right. If you are patient with yourself and approach learning with curiosity and humor, you’ll be speaking in no time, and you’ll sound great while doing it.
On learning Arabic
The U.S. military ranks Arabic as a Category IV language – part of the group of languages that take the longest time to learn for English speakers, on the same level as Mandarin and Japanese. It takes, according to the Defense Language Institute, approximately “64 weeks of long courses” to learn the language adequately.
Admittedly, I’m only at four weeks, and the courses I’ve taken weren’t exceedingly long. I still like to consider myself, however, as 1/16th of the way there. I tell myself that if I study the amount that I’ve already studied 15 more times, I will be able to communicate with the approximately 300 million people whose native tongue is Arabic.
In reality, acquiring a language is much less mathematical, and more psychological – the process of learning how to speak Arabic involves the acceptance of new conventions of speech and pronunciations, and a completely unfamiliar method of writing. It may take me many more than 64 weeks to acclimatize myself. It may take me fewer.
In either case, one year ago, having already studied a couple of Latin and Germanic languages, I decided that it was time for something a little less familiar.
The snob who is in a constant, though feeble, struggle for my control always pushes me to read literature in its original language. Because of this, Arabic held the intrigue of allowing me to read Naguib Mahfouz and One Thousand and One Nights, among others, in their original forms. That same snob also refuses to see me travel across the world, as I’ve always planned to do during my studies, without understanding the people and cultures that I encounter. So, if I didn’t want to be an illiterate, snobby North American tourist exploring the Middle East, it was only obvious that I had to learn Arabic.
These realities, along with my previous knowledge of the Arabic language (its liturgical and Semitic roots, mostly) convinced me to register in a course. As a student in Toronto at the time, I didn't have many options when it came to learning Arabic, unfortunately. I soon found that my university didn’t offer studies in Arabic, and that the only independent education available was mostly for Qoranic readings, not study of the modern language. Tempted to give up and switch to another more accessible language, I instead resolved that, if Arabic refused to find me in Toronto, I would go find it in its homeland.
So it happened that, this May, after a year of searching, planning, and saving up, I set out for a month-long stay in Cairo, one of Arabic’s cultural hubs. I chose the country in particular not only because of its appealing history, location and culture, but also because of its Arabic dialect. While I knew that Modern Standard Arabic, the artificial Arabic language that is spoken nowhere and everywhere, would be useful to me as a journalist – it is the typical language of academic studies, newspapers, government work, etc. – I also figured that it wouldn’t be as beneficial to me as a traveler. Asking locals for directions in Modern Standard would be like speaking to a New Yorker in Shakespearean English, I was told. Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, on the other hand, is the most widely spoken Arabic dialect, and can be understood throughout most of the Arab world because of the wide coverage of Egyptian movies and media.
Still, I had to admit that the multiplicity of Arabic dialects is so broad that simply learning Egyptian would never be sufficient for traveling across all Arab countries with ease. The Yemeni variety is distinct from Persian, which is in turn distinct from Algerian, and so on. I resolved to start with Egyptian, but I also reasoned that I would probably have to learn Modern Standard as well if I wanted to travel as a journalist.
A friend working in Cairo at the Dutch Institute recommended an Arabic teacher for my month in the city. I had originally planned to enroll as an international student at the University of Cairo, but many of the courses could not accept a student for simply one month, and international institutions in the city had seen a decline in attendance after the Arab Spring and the demonstrations of 2013. It was striking to notice, in fact, that the global witnessing of Egyptian protests over the past few years had destroyed much of the tourism industry. In many places that I visited during my trip, I was noticeably the only tourist, and especially the only North American one – many of whom had changed their plans to travel to a country that was considered more stable and safe.
Conveniently in this regard, the tutor I finally found was an Arabic language teacher at the American University of Cairo, who, because the attendance of students had dropped so drastically in the past year (there were almost no students left), was in search of a more independent practice. We spoke via email at first, and agreed to meet for my first lesson two days after my arrival in the city. In an effort to immerse myself in the Egyptian culture, as I had promised myself to do, I also applied for an English-language internship at a local art gallery in downtown Cairo.
Much earlier, however, I resolved to get the tedious basics of the language out of the way. I wanted to spend my short time in Cairo focused on the subjects that I couldn’t learn through a textbook, such as intricate pronunciations, cultural conventions of speech, etc. I spent the early spring, in between my studies and work, memorizing the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet – how to write them, pronounce them, recognize their sound. That was perhaps the most discouraging part of my Arabic studies. It took much, much more time and energy than I had expected, even with the help of textbooks such as Arabic for Reading and Speaking by Abdirashid A. Mohamed. (I never made it through the first few chapters.)
The Arabic alphabet, which looks so inviting, even melodic, on paper, is unlike anything I had ever tried to learn before. I was used to learning languages such as Spanish and Dutch that, though they may sound slightly different, still adhere to the same letterings as English – the same shapes and punctilios of structure. Arabic flew past all of those rules. In my first attempts, I felt the same way that I imagined a baby would feel, one who did not yet know how to write her own name. Unlike a 6-month-old child, however, I was very aware of my failure, and I had no one to guide me in the right direction.
The first step toward my Arabic admission, in effect, was to accustom my hand to writing from right to left. It was an experience I had never considered before. My palm started off the page – such a minute detail, and yet one that pulled me so widely out of comfort – and had to extend itself in a very different manner. My first attempts at scribbling down the alphabet looked and felt awkward; often I found myself writing a letter backward without knowing it, or accidentally reading a word from the wrong direction. But after many pages of practice, and the strengthening of an unfamiliar muscle in my right palm, the ink started to relax a bit.
Next came the memorization of letters. For that, I found that I needed something much more sophisticated than a notebook. For there aren’t simply 28 letters to be memorized in the Arabic alphabet, I soon discovered: each letter has three different forms in the cursive script, one for the beginning of a word, one for the middle, and one for the end. Really, though many of these forms are similar, or sometimes even the same, a student has 84 shapes to memorize.
The best method for me to accomplish this, after a bit of investigation, turned out to be electronic. I used applications on my iPad, such as Arabic Alpha and Salaam, which would display a letter of the alphabet to me as if on flashcards and prompt me to choose the right sound or name to accompany it. By the time my plane landed in Cairo in late April, I had the alphabet written down, unsteadily, and memorized.
To my dismay, I quickly realized once in Cairo that I had been learning the alphabet of Modern Standard Arabic, which is most commonly taught in textbooks and online, instead of Egyptian Arabic. I had thought that all dialects use the same alphabet, which is technically true, but in fact, though the letters look the same, many are pronounced differently according to each region’s custom. My arrival to Egypt introduced me to a slightly different Arabic than the one I had been learning – one that, for example, doesn’t articulate the letter “qaaf” (though it is still written down) and changes the pronunciation of the letters “jiim” and tha”, among others. Still, those were small details, and I was very glad to have studied the alphabet pre-arrival.
I spent a day exploring the country, growing used to the sounds of the foreign language that surrounded my new home, trying to understand its phonetics. So many of the sounds I encountered were entirely unfamiliar to me, not to be found in the Latin or Germanic tones with which I was already comfortable.
The following day, my teacher arrived at my front door and set camp on my coffee table. Her first move was to take my notebook, where I had practiced writing the alphabet, examine it, nod, and flip it front-side-down.
“This is how you open a notebook now,” she told me, opening it from right to left to expose the empty pages of what I had considered to be the back of the book. I felt guilty for not having remembered to do so when I had started to study months earlier, but she told me it was only natural to overlook such details.
I was very lucky – my teacher, an Egyptian mother of two who also spoke English, French and German, knew exactly how to ease a beginner into the intricacies of the Arabic language. She explained that the best way to learn a new language is to approach it as a child who is learning a language for the first time – untainted. I thought that approach to be only natural, considering how I already felt toward the language. She advised me to look at the textbook kullu tamam!: An Introduction to Egyptian Colloquial Arabic by Manfred Woidich and Rabha Heinen-Nasr, for a basic introduction to the language, though we never used it during lessons.
Despite my delicate familiarity with the alphabet and general phonetics, I was completely unable to read Arabic script, predominantly because its words don’t include vowels. Sure, there exist little signs, marks above and below the text that can be included to lead the reader toward the proper word and intonation. But, most often, these marks are excluded, and the writer is expected to recognize the word simply through prior knowledge.
This was a complexity I had a hard time accommodating. I spent half an hour in between my connecting flights to Cairo looking at the Arabic translations of signs at the airport, trying to decipher their meanings. Though, after some effort, I recognized the forms of letters and their connections to others, it was difficult for me to sound out the words in my head. I couldn’t imagine knowing enough words to simply recognize them by their consonants.
My teacher told me not to worry – I wasn’t even near ready to attempt that yet. We began our lesson by conversing in basic Arabic. She used body language to relate the meanings of new vocabulary, persisting until I knew how to== tell her my name, how I was doing, where I was from and what my gender was. This was repeated for an hour and a half, begrudgingly, while I toiled to memorize each distinctive utterance, keeping in mind the modifications that had to be made when addressing a man or a woman. (These modifications are singular to the Egyptian dialect, I believe.)
Once my teacher was confident that I had learned enough for one lesson, acknowledging, accurately, that my brain was likely already worn out, she opened my notebook, right side up, and wrote down every word I had learned so that I could study them again. I watched the pen slide on the page with fascination, noticing the ease with which she switched between the Arabic and Roman alphabets, from one orientation of the page to the next. Slowly, I started to recognize words through their spelling, but only because I already knew what to expect.
In that moment, following my teacher’s tranquil writing, Arabic script no longer seemed to me the impossible code that it was when I tried to imitate it. Through the fluidity of her hand, the lettering looked more like drawing. The lines held little meaning for me, but transmitted their own conviction as artistic narratives, dotted and crossed with the same oriental style that I saw on Egyptian restaurant signs and underground graffiti.
This admiration is a feeling I’ve often held toward good teachers, those who emit a feeling of comfort toward their subject while acknowledging what the student is still struggling to understand. I wanted to write as eloquently as her, to naturally pick a book up and read it from right to left, to feel no need for the diacritical vowels in between Arabic consonants.
After writing every word down in my notebook, along with its proper translation – I, still dazed by her effortless script – my teacher spoke through each word she had written down. She made sure to slowly repeat every sound as I recorded it on my computer – a touch that I greatly appreciated. My first study session, and each one after that, consisted of listening to her recorded speech and following it with my finger on the notebook page as I read through the day’s new vocabulary and sentences. That was my first step toward associating Arabic letter with sound.
Still, pronunciation did not come easily for me. It doesn’t even now. I was less impressed by my teacher’s abilities as I was at a loss for mine – literally. I had the impression that Arabic was completely unforgiving of my accent. My inability to roll my Rs, something I’ve been unable to do my entire life, made my “raa” sound like a “ghayn”, and my general lack of control made my “daal” and my “daad”, my “qaaf” and my “kaaf”, and my “siin” and my “saad” sound indistinguishable. It was with trouble that I could express myself accurately without making two similar words sound the same.
My teacher was ruthless, however – as I had hoped for her to be. I was led outside of the house during the end of my first lesson, set free (to a reasonable degree) to ask locals how to get to the supermarket from my street corner. Though I barely understood the replies that were given to me, I began to recognize that maybe spoken Arabic is not as indecipherable as I had originally thought.
In fact, I was happy to find that some of the words I learnt were actually similar to ones that I already knew. Many Arabic words were borrowed from, or in some cases borrowed by, Spanish and French, and I felt a boost every time I encountered them, knowing that I wasn’t completely ignorant.
My lessons carried on in a similar manner to the first one, occurring three to four times a week. My teacher, ever so patient, would come in the morning before I started my day at the art gallery internship and start with one to two hours of conversation and vocabulary. We would move on to writing and recording her voice, and, if there was time, end with an excursion into the Egyptian world where I could apply my newfound vocabulary. With this in mind, I traveled with her to outdoor markets and even to her family home, where I learnt how to cook a traditional Egyptian dish, all in Arabic. If we had no time to go out during the lesson, I was instructed to use specific sentences during my own travels throughout the city, when interacting with vendors or taxi drivers.
There would often be a theme to our lesson, whether it was clothing, food, or geography. Other times, however, I would ask for the lesson to be a review. I needed an opportunity to massage the brain, and to convey to my teacher all of my misunderstandings with the language. Why were some actions treated as possessions and others as verbs? Why were there different endings for words that dealt with men and with women? How could I ever properly pronounce the word “Misr” (meaning Egypt), which ended awkwardly in two consonants like so many other words in the Arabic language? All of these were mysteries to me, and often she would sincerely answer that I wasn’t yet ready to understand the complexities of their explanations. But she always did answer, eventually.
After three weeks of vocabulary, my teacher judged that I might, maybe, be ready to delve into the complex world of Egyptian grammar. It didn’t sound so daunting at first – after all, grammar is simply a set of rules, and rules only need to be followed. I became more scared when she began to draw long graphs into my notebook, now already half full. She outlined the different endings that should be added to nouns and verbs depending on their subject. Since we only had a week left to go through the basics of grammar, however, I only had the chance to dabble in the rules before our lessons were over, and they stay dangerously close to the limits of my understanding.
My four weeks of Arabic passed so quickly that I barely recognized all that I had learned with my teacher. Still a beginner, I had nevertheless transitioned from hopeless, awkward beginner to confident, practiced beginner, and I had learned enough to return to Canada without running the risk of forgetting it all. I had passed the threshold of knowledge that separates aspiring student and real working novice. Now, though I am still not at the level to keep up with fluent discussion or read a piece of Arabic text, I do recognize the language when I see it, and understand the basic gist of a conversation.
Back in Toronto for school in September, I hope to continue studying; even if that means returning to Cairo next time I have the opportunity, or finding an institution in Toronto similar to the Arabic School of New York. Either way, I am content in knowing that I am 1/16th of the way closer to being a fluent speaker of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic.
The U.S. military ranks Arabic as a Category IV language – part of the group of languages that take the longest time to learn for English speakers, on the same level as Mandarin and Japanese. It takes, according to the Defense Language Institute, approximately “64 weeks of long courses” to learn the language adequately.
Admittedly, I’m only at four weeks, and the courses I’ve taken weren’t exceedingly long. I still like to consider myself, however, as 1/16th of the way there. I tell myself that if I study the amount that I’ve already studied 15 more times, I will be able to communicate with the approximately 300 million people whose native tongue is Arabic.
In reality, acquiring a language is much less mathematical, and more psychological – the process of learning how to speak Arabic involves the acceptance of new conventions of speech and pronunciations, and a completely unfamiliar method of writing. It may take me many more than 64 weeks to acclimatize myself. It may take me fewer.
In either case, one year ago, having already studied a couple of Latin and Germanic languages, I decided that it was time for something a little less familiar.
The snob who is in a constant, though feeble, struggle for my control always pushes me to read literature in its original language. Because of this, Arabic held the intrigue of allowing me to read Naguib Mahfouz and One Thousand and One Nights, among others, in their original forms. That same snob also refuses to see me travel across the world, as I’ve always planned to do during my studies, without understanding the people and cultures that I encounter. So, if I didn’t want to be an illiterate, snobby North American tourist exploring the Middle East, it was only obvious that I had to learn Arabic.
These realities, along with my previous knowledge of the Arabic language (its liturgical and Semitic roots, mostly) convinced me to register in a course. As a student in Toronto at the time, I didn't have many options when it came to learning Arabic, unfortunately. I soon found that my university didn’t offer studies in Arabic, and that the only independent education available was mostly for Qoranic readings, not study of the modern language. Tempted to give up and switch to another more accessible language, I instead resolved that, if Arabic refused to find me in Toronto, I would go find it in its homeland.
So it happened that, this May, after a year of searching, planning, and saving up, I set out for a month-long stay in Cairo, one of Arabic’s cultural hubs. I chose the country in particular not only because of its appealing history, location and culture, but also because of its Arabic dialect. While I knew that Modern Standard Arabic, the artificial Arabic language that is spoken nowhere and everywhere, would be useful to me as a journalist – it is the typical language of academic studies, newspapers, government work, etc. – I also figured that it wouldn’t be as beneficial to me as a traveler. Asking locals for directions in Modern Standard would be like speaking to a New Yorker in Shakespearean English, I was told. Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, on the other hand, is the most widely spoken Arabic dialect, and can be understood throughout most of the Arab world because of the wide coverage of Egyptian movies and media.
Still, I had to admit that the multiplicity of Arabic dialects is so broad that simply learning Egyptian would never be sufficient for traveling across all Arab countries with ease. The Yemeni variety is distinct from Persian, which is in turn distinct from Algerian, and so on. I resolved to start with Egyptian, but I also reasoned that I would probably have to learn Modern Standard as well if I wanted to travel as a journalist.
A friend working in Cairo at the Dutch Institute recommended an Arabic teacher for my month in the city. I had originally planned to enroll as an international student at the University of Cairo, but many of the courses could not accept a student for simply one month, and international institutions in the city had seen a decline in attendance after the Arab Spring and the demonstrations of 2013. It was striking to notice, in fact, that the global witnessing of Egyptian protests over the past few years had destroyed much of the tourism industry. In many places that I visited during my trip, I was noticeably the only tourist, and especially the only North American one – many of whom had changed their plans to travel to a country that was considered more stable and safe.
Conveniently in this regard, the tutor I finally found was an Arabic language teacher at the American University of Cairo, who, because the attendance of students had dropped so drastically in the past year (there were almost no students left), was in search of a more independent practice. We spoke via email at first, and agreed to meet for my first lesson two days after my arrival in the city. In an effort to immerse myself in the Egyptian culture, as I had promised myself to do, I also applied for an English-language internship at a local art gallery in downtown Cairo.
Much earlier, however, I resolved to get the tedious basics of the language out of the way. I wanted to spend my short time in Cairo focused on the subjects that I couldn’t learn through a textbook, such as intricate pronunciations, cultural conventions of speech, etc. I spent the early spring, in between my studies and work, memorizing the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet – how to write them, pronounce them, recognize their sound. That was perhaps the most discouraging part of my Arabic studies. It took much, much more time and energy than I had expected, even with the help of textbooks such as Arabic for Reading and Speaking by Abdirashid A. Mohamed. (I never made it through the first few chapters.)
The Arabic alphabet, which looks so inviting, even melodic, on paper, is unlike anything I had ever tried to learn before. I was used to learning languages such as Spanish and Dutch that, though they may sound slightly different, still adhere to the same letterings as English – the same shapes and punctilios of structure. Arabic flew past all of those rules. In my first attempts, I felt the same way that I imagined a baby would feel, one who did not yet know how to write her own name. Unlike a 6-month-old child, however, I was very aware of my failure, and I had no one to guide me in the right direction.
The first step toward my Arabic admission, in effect, was to accustom my hand to writing from right to left. It was an experience I had never considered before. My palm started off the page – such a minute detail, and yet one that pulled me so widely out of comfort – and had to extend itself in a very different manner. My first attempts at scribbling down the alphabet looked and felt awkward; often I found myself writing a letter backward without knowing it, or accidentally reading a word from the wrong direction. But after many pages of practice, and the strengthening of an unfamiliar muscle in my right palm, the ink started to relax a bit.
Next came the memorization of letters. For that, I found that I needed something much more sophisticated than a notebook. For there aren’t simply 28 letters to be memorized in the Arabic alphabet, I soon discovered: each letter has three different forms in the cursive script, one for the beginning of a word, one for the middle, and one for the end. Really, though many of these forms are similar, or sometimes even the same, a student has 84 shapes to memorize.
The best method for me to accomplish this, after a bit of investigation, turned out to be electronic. I used applications on my iPad, such as Arabic Alpha and Salaam, which would display a letter of the alphabet to me as if on flashcards and prompt me to choose the right sound or name to accompany it. By the time my plane landed in Cairo in late April, I had the alphabet written down, unsteadily, and memorized.
To my dismay, I quickly realized once in Cairo that I had been learning the alphabet of Modern Standard Arabic, which is most commonly taught in textbooks and online, instead of Egyptian Arabic. I had thought that all dialects use the same alphabet, which is technically true, but in fact, though the letters look the same, many are pronounced differently according to each region’s custom. My arrival to Egypt introduced me to a slightly different Arabic than the one I had been learning – one that, for example, doesn’t articulate the letter “qaaf” (though it is still written down) and changes the pronunciation of the letters “jiim” and tha”, among others. Still, those were small details, and I was very glad to have studied the alphabet pre-arrival.
I spent a day exploring the country, growing used to the sounds of the foreign language that surrounded my new home, trying to understand its phonetics. So many of the sounds I encountered were entirely unfamiliar to me, not to be found in the Latin or Germanic tones with which I was already comfortable.
The following day, my teacher arrived at my front door and set camp on my coffee table. Her first move was to take my notebook, where I had practiced writing the alphabet, examine it, nod, and flip it front-side-down.
“This is how you open a notebook now,” she told me, opening it from right to left to expose the empty pages of what I had considered to be the back of the book. I felt guilty for not having remembered to do so when I had started to study months earlier, but she told me it was only natural to overlook such details.
I was very lucky – my teacher, an Egyptian mother of two who also spoke English, French and German, knew exactly how to ease a beginner into the intricacies of the Arabic language. She explained that the best way to learn a new language is to approach it as a child who is learning a language for the first time – untainted. I thought that approach to be only natural, considering how I already felt toward the language. She advised me to look at the textbook kullu tamam!: An Introduction to Egyptian Colloquial Arabic by Manfred Woidich and Rabha Heinen-Nasr, for a basic introduction to the language, though we never used it during lessons.
Despite my delicate familiarity with the alphabet and general phonetics, I was completely unable to read Arabic script, predominantly because its words don’t include vowels. Sure, there exist little signs, marks above and below the text that can be included to lead the reader toward the proper word and intonation. But, most often, these marks are excluded, and the writer is expected to recognize the word simply through prior knowledge.
This was a complexity I had a hard time accommodating. I spent half an hour in between my connecting flights to Cairo looking at the Arabic translations of signs at the airport, trying to decipher their meanings. Though, after some effort, I recognized the forms of letters and their connections to others, it was difficult for me to sound out the words in my head. I couldn’t imagine knowing enough words to simply recognize them by their consonants.
My teacher told me not to worry – I wasn’t even near ready to attempt that yet. We began our lesson by conversing in basic Arabic. She used body language to relate the meanings of new vocabulary, persisting until I knew how to== tell her my name, how I was doing, where I was from and what my gender was. This was repeated for an hour and a half, begrudgingly, while I toiled to memorize each distinctive utterance, keeping in mind the modifications that had to be made when addressing a man or a woman. (These modifications are singular to the Egyptian dialect, I believe.)
Once my teacher was confident that I had learned enough for one lesson, acknowledging, accurately, that my brain was likely already worn out, she opened my notebook, right side up, and wrote down every word I had learned so that I could study them again. I watched the pen slide on the page with fascination, noticing the ease with which she switched between the Arabic and Roman alphabets, from one orientation of the page to the next. Slowly, I started to recognize words through their spelling, but only because I already knew what to expect.
In that moment, following my teacher’s tranquil writing, Arabic script no longer seemed to me the impossible code that it was when I tried to imitate it. Through the fluidity of her hand, the lettering looked more like drawing. The lines held little meaning for me, but transmitted their own conviction as artistic narratives, dotted and crossed with the same oriental style that I saw on Egyptian restaurant signs and underground graffiti.
This admiration is a feeling I’ve often held toward good teachers, those who emit a feeling of comfort toward their subject while acknowledging what the student is still struggling to understand. I wanted to write as eloquently as her, to naturally pick a book up and read it from right to left, to feel no need for the diacritical vowels in between Arabic consonants.
After writing every word down in my notebook, along with its proper translation – I, still dazed by her effortless script – my teacher spoke through each word she had written down. She made sure to slowly repeat every sound as I recorded it on my computer – a touch that I greatly appreciated. My first study session, and each one after that, consisted of listening to her recorded speech and following it with my finger on the notebook page as I read through the day’s new vocabulary and sentences. That was my first step toward associating Arabic letter with sound.
Still, pronunciation did not come easily for me. It doesn’t even now. I was less impressed by my teacher’s abilities as I was at a loss for mine – literally. I had the impression that Arabic was completely unforgiving of my accent. My inability to roll my Rs, something I’ve been unable to do my entire life, made my “raa” sound like a “ghayn”, and my general lack of control made my “daal” and my “daad”, my “qaaf” and my “kaaf”, and my “siin” and my “saad” sound indistinguishable. It was with trouble that I could express myself accurately without making two similar words sound the same.
My teacher was ruthless, however – as I had hoped for her to be. I was led outside of the house during the end of my first lesson, set free (to a reasonable degree) to ask locals how to get to the supermarket from my street corner. Though I barely understood the replies that were given to me, I began to recognize that maybe spoken Arabic is not as indecipherable as I had originally thought.
In fact, I was happy to find that some of the words I learnt were actually similar to ones that I already knew. Many Arabic words were borrowed from, or in some cases borrowed by, Spanish and French, and I felt a boost every time I encountered them, knowing that I wasn’t completely ignorant.
My lessons carried on in a similar manner to the first one, occurring three to four times a week. My teacher, ever so patient, would come in the morning before I started my day at the art gallery internship and start with one to two hours of conversation and vocabulary. We would move on to writing and recording her voice, and, if there was time, end with an excursion into the Egyptian world where I could apply my newfound vocabulary. With this in mind, I traveled with her to outdoor markets and even to her family home, where I learnt how to cook a traditional Egyptian dish, all in Arabic. If we had no time to go out during the lesson, I was instructed to use specific sentences during my own travels throughout the city, when interacting with vendors or taxi drivers.
There would often be a theme to our lesson, whether it was clothing, food, or geography. Other times, however, I would ask for the lesson to be a review. I needed an opportunity to massage the brain, and to convey to my teacher all of my misunderstandings with the language. Why were some actions treated as possessions and others as verbs? Why were there different endings for words that dealt with men and with women? How could I ever properly pronounce the word “Misr” (meaning Egypt), which ended awkwardly in two consonants like so many other words in the Arabic language? All of these were mysteries to me, and often she would sincerely answer that I wasn’t yet ready to understand the complexities of their explanations. But she always did answer, eventually.
After three weeks of vocabulary, my teacher judged that I might, maybe, be ready to delve into the complex world of Egyptian grammar. It didn’t sound so daunting at first – after all, grammar is simply a set of rules, and rules only need to be followed. I became more scared when she began to draw long graphs into my notebook, now already half full. She outlined the different endings that should be added to nouns and verbs depending on their subject. Since we only had a week left to go through the basics of grammar, however, I only had the chance to dabble in the rules before our lessons were over, and they stay dangerously close to the limits of my understanding.
My four weeks of Arabic passed so quickly that I barely recognized all that I had learned with my teacher. Still a beginner, I had nevertheless transitioned from hopeless, awkward beginner to confident, practiced beginner, and I had learned enough to return to Canada without running the risk of forgetting it all. I had passed the threshold of knowledge that separates aspiring student and real working novice. Now, though I am still not at the level to keep up with fluent discussion or read a piece of Arabic text, I do recognize the language when I see it, and understand the basic gist of a conversation.
Back in Toronto for school in September, I hope to continue studying; even if that means returning to Cairo next time I have the opportunity, or finding an institution in Toronto similar to the Arabic School of New York. Either way, I am content in knowing that I am 1/16th of the way closer to being a fluent speaker of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic.
In 2009, I began my undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania. I was a first-generation college student who had grown up in rural northern New Hampshire, and My sole goal in attending college was to attain a degree in some sort of field that would let me travel, and in this way I decided that my one true calling was Latin American archaeology. I started studying Spanish and looking for expeditions I could join to get practical experience. I never intended to learn Arabic, and perhaps that’s what makes my story an interesting one. I began my studies for one simple reason--I had made some new, unexpected friends, and I wanted to be able to talk to them.
The summer after my freshman year, I traveled to Jordan with an archaeology professor to work on her dig. When she accepted me for the position, I asked her if I should prepare in any way, and she said no, we would be with English speakers so there was no reason to worry.
To some extent, I believed her, but it was only my third time out of the country and my first time on my own and not in the West. I wanted to be prepared. I started asking my Muslim friends if they would help me, and they tried to explain the tenets of Islam and the nuances of Arab society to me. We spent hours working on getting me to say “salamualaekum correctly. “Walaykumasalam” was simply too much of a mouthful. I had studied French, German, and Spanish before and they came quite naturally to me, but I had encountered nothing like this.
Finally, it was time to leave for my trip. I remember being on the plane, asleep, and then opening my eyes to see a crescent moon dangling over the scrub brush desert of Jordan. I saw rolling hills, and I saw Amman, a cream-colored cloud smudged with dirt, settled on earth, sprawling endlessly. I had never seen anything like it, and I couldn’t wait to get my feet on the ground.
However, we were not staying in Amman. We were staying in central Jordan, in a place so obscure that Google Maps cannot locate it, near Wadi al-Hasa. It was a tiny village of about twenty small white houses, very square, very plain, with tall thick white fences surrounding them. We were staying in the elementary school, where we slept on cots. Our first day was spent sweeping and scrubbing red dust from the walls and floors. It was literally a four-room schoolhouse with two outbuildings for bathrooms and a small kitchen and cafeteria.
In short, where we were was rural, and nobody spoke English.
I had red hair, I was 19, and all of my clothing was completely inappropriate for this setting, because I had not been warned. I stuck out. My professor was considerably older and the other two westerners were Crotatian and French, both men, and all three liked to drink beer in the computer room at night. I was not invited.
The other people with us were Arab graduate students in archaeology, who inevitably work on any Western excavation, and they were the people I made friends with. I didn’t do it on purpose. When you excavate, you work in pairs, two people to oversee each meter-by-meter square, and on our team we paired Arabs and Americans together. I was with my now-friend Jamal, and I asked him questions about the Prophet and his religion and he started telling me stories from the Quran and the story of the Prophet, in English with little Arabic lessons included for fun, just to pass the time.
They were the most beautiful, wonderful stories I had ever heard, and I wanted to be able to read them in Arabic. More practically speaking, I wanted to be able to read signs and participate in conversations. I began spending my evenings sitting with the men until sundown, learning to read, write, count, and say tiny, useless phrases that made them laugh like crazy people. “Shaklak fahem ya Nosa,” a famous line from an Egyptian movie, especially made them crack up.
Most importantly, I learned how to listen. They would sit and speak with each other about religion or politics, and it would be rapid-fire Arabic, no chance of me understanding with my ten-word vocabulary and memorized grammar. This didn’t stop me. I payed attention to how they moved their hands, their inflection, how easily qaf and ghrain hopped from the backs of their throats into the air, and I listened for words I recognized. In this way, I could figure out the topic of conversation, if I heard the words “rasul” or “siasa,” I knew the general topic, and if I could catch a proper noun, perhaps the name of a city or person, then I could really hone in on what was happening.
I read everything I could get my hands on--my friend’s driver’s license, signs at the gas station, shampoo bottles. I tried my hand at the children’s books in the school, but they were far too difficult, even if their pictures were enchanting. Even though I couldn’t understand the meaning of their sentences, I still spent hours learning to sound them out. Once, I found a stack of workbooks in which the kids were practicing scrawling out the English alphabet and sentences like, “I don’t like dogs” or, “Elephants are my favorite animal.” I realized that these six year olds knew way more English than I knew Arabic, and it was impressive and intimidating.
The children were excited to be able to teach me nursery rhymes, laughing at my horrible accent, and they loved my ugly Arabic letters. One time, a three-year old started singing me a song, and I asked his mom, “What is he saying?”
“Oh, something about a duck.”
The longer I spent in Jordan, the more determined I became to be able to communicate with people. My stay was only three months, but I loved my new friends and the new world I had found. When I returned to my university in the fall, I began taking Arabic classes. At the time, I had no idea what a significant decision that would be.
The summer after my freshman year, I traveled to Jordan with an archaeology professor to work on her dig. When she accepted me for the position, I asked her if I should prepare in any way, and she said no, we would be with English speakers so there was no reason to worry.
To some extent, I believed her, but it was only my third time out of the country and my first time on my own and not in the West. I wanted to be prepared. I started asking my Muslim friends if they would help me, and they tried to explain the tenets of Islam and the nuances of Arab society to me. We spent hours working on getting me to say “salamualaekum correctly. “Walaykumasalam” was simply too much of a mouthful. I had studied French, German, and Spanish before and they came quite naturally to me, but I had encountered nothing like this.
Finally, it was time to leave for my trip. I remember being on the plane, asleep, and then opening my eyes to see a crescent moon dangling over the scrub brush desert of Jordan. I saw rolling hills, and I saw Amman, a cream-colored cloud smudged with dirt, settled on earth, sprawling endlessly. I had never seen anything like it, and I couldn’t wait to get my feet on the ground.
However, we were not staying in Amman. We were staying in central Jordan, in a place so obscure that Google Maps cannot locate it, near Wadi al-Hasa. It was a tiny village of about twenty small white houses, very square, very plain, with tall thick white fences surrounding them. We were staying in the elementary school, where we slept on cots. Our first day was spent sweeping and scrubbing red dust from the walls and floors. It was literally a four-room schoolhouse with two outbuildings for bathrooms and a small kitchen and cafeteria.
In short, where we were was rural, and nobody spoke English.
I had red hair, I was 19, and all of my clothing was completely inappropriate for this setting, because I had not been warned. I stuck out. My professor was considerably older and the other two westerners were Crotatian and French, both men, and all three liked to drink beer in the computer room at night. I was not invited.
The other people with us were Arab graduate students in archaeology, who inevitably work on any Western excavation, and they were the people I made friends with. I didn’t do it on purpose. When you excavate, you work in pairs, two people to oversee each meter-by-meter square, and on our team we paired Arabs and Americans together. I was with my now-friend Jamal, and I asked him questions about the Prophet and his religion and he started telling me stories from the Quran and the story of the Prophet, in English with little Arabic lessons included for fun, just to pass the time.
They were the most beautiful, wonderful stories I had ever heard, and I wanted to be able to read them in Arabic. More practically speaking, I wanted to be able to read signs and participate in conversations. I began spending my evenings sitting with the men until sundown, learning to read, write, count, and say tiny, useless phrases that made them laugh like crazy people. “Shaklak fahem ya Nosa,” a famous line from an Egyptian movie, especially made them crack up.
Most importantly, I learned how to listen. They would sit and speak with each other about religion or politics, and it would be rapid-fire Arabic, no chance of me understanding with my ten-word vocabulary and memorized grammar. This didn’t stop me. I payed attention to how they moved their hands, their inflection, how easily qaf and ghrain hopped from the backs of their throats into the air, and I listened for words I recognized. In this way, I could figure out the topic of conversation, if I heard the words “rasul” or “siasa,” I knew the general topic, and if I could catch a proper noun, perhaps the name of a city or person, then I could really hone in on what was happening.
I read everything I could get my hands on--my friend’s driver’s license, signs at the gas station, shampoo bottles. I tried my hand at the children’s books in the school, but they were far too difficult, even if their pictures were enchanting. Even though I couldn’t understand the meaning of their sentences, I still spent hours learning to sound them out. Once, I found a stack of workbooks in which the kids were practicing scrawling out the English alphabet and sentences like, “I don’t like dogs” or, “Elephants are my favorite animal.” I realized that these six year olds knew way more English than I knew Arabic, and it was impressive and intimidating.
The children were excited to be able to teach me nursery rhymes, laughing at my horrible accent, and they loved my ugly Arabic letters. One time, a three-year old started singing me a song, and I asked his mom, “What is he saying?”
“Oh, something about a duck.”
The longer I spent in Jordan, the more determined I became to be able to communicate with people. My stay was only three months, but I loved my new friends and the new world I had found. When I returned to my university in the fall, I began taking Arabic classes. At the time, I had no idea what a significant decision that would be.