My passionate study of the Arabic language for a good two years is now officially on the back burner. The good news is it sure was fun. And from time to time still is.
It was not a very good idea to begin with, I admit. I like to tell people that I started studying Arabic for dumb reason (no, not a girl) – because I read Ghost Wars. If you’ve read it you know why this is a dumb reason (it’s about the non-Arabic speaking country Afghanistan). The truth is I was generally interested in the language because I was reading a lot about the Middle East at the time.
What I didn’t take into account was the biggest pitfall to studying Arabic – the language evolved over thousands of years across thousands of miles into more than a dozen different dialects that are often mutually incomprehensible. The formal or classical version of the language is supposed to unite the different branches of it, but in practice nobody in the Middle East actually speaks it. Arabs of different countries often communicate in English in French. If you’re doing business in the Middle East, being a Muslim will probably open as many doors as speaking some halting Arabic. Oops, wrong language?
Maybe, but I got hooked pretty quickly. My favorite part was and still is the fact that it looks cool. This must sound silly to someone who grew up with the language, maybe a bit like hearing some say “Wow, check out these letters, A,B,C – cool!” Learning a new alphabet seems like the most daunting part of learning a distant language, but I actually found it was the easiest (it’s much harder, for example, to learn words that have no relationship to anything you’ve ever heard before).
I started out spending a couple months with a book and a set of CDs practicing how to write the script and doing some dictations. It sometimes felt like being on drugs. Trying to think in totally different characters made my head pound. It made my heart race. And it was addicting like a narcotic. For another six months after that I practiced with Rosetta Stone, until its predictable repetitiveness and its cookie-cutter approach drove me insane. That’s when I found Mohamed.
A Tunisian language teacher who had gone to Venezuela to teach French, he found there was more demand for Arabic and became the only game in town. He taught at more universities than I could count and worked absurd hours. I’ve never had a professor that was so enthusiastic about what he was doing. He would spend an hour writing Arabic on a dry-erase board in three different colors of markers to differentiate the root letters, the normally unwritten vowels, and the grammatical endings. For a bit over a year, twice a week, Mohammed explained the structure of the language in penetrating detail. I’ll never forget the first class we had; he stood at the board writing, talking, pacing back and forth, getting really excited every time I could more or less answer a question. He was so busy he didn’t even touch the cup of coffee I had brought him until it had gotten cold.
When I left Venezuela I basically left my Arabic classes behind, but kept studying on my own. I had several amazing instruction books that Mohamed had written, but I needed something that would keep the language alive for me. I chose a method that would likely make most language teachers cringe, but has helped keep the language in my mind since then even in the absence of formal instruction.
I made lists of words with the Arabic on one side and the translation on the other (I’m sure somebody out there already wants to say “No, no, no, never do it that way, you have to learn intuitively and never, ever rely on translation” – I’ll stay away from this one for now). I would carry them in my pocket and stare at them on the metro, while standing in line, or when I couldn’t sleep, figuring out mnemonic devices that would link a word with a pronunciation like “ha-ja-ma” with the English word “attack.”
I learned enough of these words that I could enter my training grounds – BBC Arabic. At first I could only get through the headline, but over time beefed up my news vocabulary by memorizing the Arabic translations for terms like “election” or “president” or “arrest.” For months I would stare at the words on the screen, parsing every letter and scrounging through the depths of my memory for the meaning. After a while I could get through the lede and first few paragraphs of a story, usually with the benefit of having already read the same story on the wire in English. It was a closed and controlled environment that gave me exciting experience of reading things in Arabic that had to do with current events in the Arab world. But what was even more exciting was when I got to the point that I didn’t have to pick through each letter because I had started to recognize words, which meant something truly amazing to me: I was reading in Arabic. It was a thrilling learning-to-ride-a-bike sensation, one I still enjoy every time I glance at an Arabic text (OK, an Arabic text related to a news story that I can relatively easily follow, but you get my point).
I spent months following the Yemen civil war at a time when the country was pretty well off the radar screen of Western news agencies – ironic because these days it’s headline news. Even back in 2009 when the world didn’t care, it was a pretty dramatic saga. The government of Yemen launched weeks of air strikes against the Shiite Houthi rebels in the north while simultaneously battling Sunni separatists in South. The Houthis at one point even killed a Saudi security officer in a cross-border raid, leading the Saudis to bomb Houthi positions in Yemen. In a bizarre twist, BBC Arabic reported the Houthis were recruiting Somali refugees to fight the Yemeni government.
When a Yemen-trained Nigerian militant tried to blow up a plane landing in Detroit on Christmas Eve 2009, the world suddenly discovered this nation existed.
In my halting Arabic, I followed stories in late 2009 and early 2010 that have long since been overshadowed by events in the region: the brewing Lebanon political crisis, the partition of Sudan, the Israeli siege of Gaza and bombardment of smuggling tunnels, Iraq’s almost year-long struggle to build a unity government.
I did have an ace in the sleeve: VerbAce, an incredibly thorough digital English-Arabic dictionary. It also helped that the stories were written in simple BBC style that made it easy for me grasp their meaning even if I missed some of the words.
But it had the perverse consequence that I always flocked towards stories that I knew would be easiest to understand, which were generally the ones about suicide bombings and predator drone attacks. They were always written in terse just-the-facts-ma’am phrasing with a structure that was almost always identical. I from time to time would stray into Reuters’ Arabic service, and when I was feeling really bold would explore the wilds of Google News Arabic, at which point I was pretty quickly drowning in local Gulf politics and inside baseball about Lebanese political coalitions.
The trouble was and still is that I can’t speak much Arabic. Without that element there’s very little social interaction, which turns the experience into a solitary exercise with little obvious social outlet. Actually learning to speak it is of course complicated by the multiple dialect problem – you don’t know which one you want to learn until you have an idea of who you want to speak with. Some cursory searches for an Arabic teacher in Rio didn’t turn up a lot of obvious leads (the main Middle Eastern community in Brazil is in Sao Paulo), and at the same time it didn’t feel right to be really studying Arabic while I was living in Brazil. The adventure started to feel like a path that I would never get too far along. Or, as I put it in one Facebook status update, Arabic started to feel like one of those women that always smiles but never gives her number.
I still flip through some BBC stories from time to time. I get some tweets in Arabic from an Al Jazeera correspondent that are fun because they’re short, they’re informative, they relate to current events, and I can sometimes understand them without the help of translation software. I’m not a likely candidate to get sent off to cover the Middle East turmoil, but it’s nice to be able to watch video footage of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya or Yemen and be able to understand some of the slogans painted on signs.
So until there’s some obvious change of course, it stays where it is. It reminds me a bit of my decision in 2001, just after moving to Venezuela, to start studying Portuguese, for no apparent reason. I even spent a month in Rio in 2005 taking a Portuguese course and getting to know Brazil. There was no obvious upside for doing that at the time, but it ended up working out like gangbusters once I got a job in Rio. Arabic is so much further from any language I know that it seems less likely it will come in handy. But you really never know.
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