My favorite depiction of language learning is in the movie The 13th Warrior. Antonio Banderas’ character, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, picks up Old Norse in a matter of weeks by merely listening. Once he understands the words, he begins speaking fluently with conjugated verbs and perfect accent! I wish it were that easy!
I started learning French in middle school, then switched to German in high school. After I got my BA in German literature, I started on Ancient Greek when I was doing my PhD. After graduation, I got a teaching job at a new university in the Emirates.
During the weeks before I moved to Sharjah, I sat in cafés in Bethesda, Maryland practicing my Arabic letters in a beginner’s language book. Sipping lattes and writing out the shapes in my new calligraphy pen, I felt like I was quite the woman of the world.
During my first year of teaching in the Emirates, it was all I could do to keep up with my own students, but at the start of the second year I was part of a group of expat faculty and staff who requested that the administration create an Arabic class for us. I gradually realized, as we jumped through hoop after hoop, that no one wanted the expats to learn Arabic. English was for whatever needed to be said in public; the real decisions were made in Arabic.
We finally got a Westerner who knew Arabic to teach us and we soldiered on twice a week at lunch time for 4 or 5 months. I could transliterate, say simple phrases and bargain in stores but not do anything really useful.
I went back to the States for a few years, then returned to the Middle East. The first semester I was in Oman, I was simply surviving and getting over my culture shock, then I finally got to the point where I was ready to start learning Arabic again. There was an official class but the teacher was not very pleasant, so I asked a Lebanese co-worker if we could met once a week for lessons.
He was a kind man but it took a long time to find the right level for me. He started me on children’s stories without diacritics. Short Arabic vowels are not written as a letter but as a small mark above or below the consonant it is pared with; in regular writing such as in a newspaper, you will see “ktb” and if you don’t know the word, you can’t know if it is kataba, kitibi, kutubu, katibu, kituba, etc. I would sound out the consonants painfully slowly, then make random guesses as to the consonants. Total speculation.
He finally moved to an easier children’s book with diacritics: the mean mouse and the friendly turtle who rescued him. But it was rough going. And at the end of the semester the professor moved away.
In the fall, another American woman happened to remark that she had studied Arabic. “Can you teach me?” I asked and I started my next attempt. She had a young son who she was trying to teach Arabic to, so it worked out well; she would read him baby books in Arabic, then hand them off to me to struggle through. It is amazing to work out a language from the beginning, like a child. Amazing meaning, of course, frustrating.
I am a grown woman. I have navigated foreign countries and unruly students; I have a car and an IRA, and what is that papa hedgehog saying to baby hedgehog – ‘come here’ or ‘I will come’? Is that a past tense verb or a preposition? Where’s the vowel? I read with perfect interest and concentration about Shelly the Shell who got a grain of sand stuck in her mouth, would she recover? Why is that squirrel crying? Will the frog help her friend the turtle turn over? If the painter put blue over the cat’s yellow leg, what would happen? Drama! Tension!
I was happy to pay for the teaching and many Arabic children’s books, but I was always hoping to find a class so I could learn with other students.
One chance was an Arabic class that was offered at a local language school. I went to the first meeting which was difficult as I kept getting stuck in cultural chasms. Most of the other students were expat teachers so they kept articulating their needs (I would like interactive speaking exercises, I would like to have graduated listening activities, etc.) but our Arabic teacher had never taught before, so it was unlikely that they would understand, much less be able to produce what the students wanted.
The second issue was the choice of vocabulary. When our teacher asked us what expressions did we want to know, I said, “You are a brilliant student!” The woman next to me said with scorn, “Oh, you just want someone to say that to you!”
I thought, most of us are teachers, wouldn’t we want to have something positive to say to our students? But no one else was interested in being positive. We did not learn “please” or “thank you”; we learned third person commands: “Sit! stand up! read! repeat! listen!” as if we were in a dog-training class. We did learn, “Excuse me” but only because one expat wanted to know how to say, “Get out of my way!”
The third issue was the teaching style. During the third class, the teacher presented us with a list of 16 sentences in Arabic. He read them aloud, then we had to put the sentences in the correct order to make a conversation. As I was working on it, I asked him the meaning of one word. He said, “You can figure it out” and said the word slowly.
I said, “No, I don’t know that word, can you please tell me?” As the teacher was fluent in English, I knew that he knew the meaning.
He repeated the word again in Arabic and I said, “I am sorry – repeating it doesn’t help, I don’t understand, could you please just tell me in English what this word means?”
He said, “If you think about it, you will get it.”
I said, “This is not really effective. I am lost here, can you please tell me what this word means?”
He said it again in Arabic.
I didn’t return to that class, but I eventually found an Arabic language summer school to attend, and with the help of Jane Wightwick and Mahmoud Gaafar’s books, I got to a low intermediate level.
Me Talk Pretty Never: Learning Arabic, part 2
Practicalities of Moving to the Arabian Peninsula: Using the Arabic Language
New essay: “’Ayn is for Arab” on “The Arabic Alphabet” website (by Michael Beard)
Selected Books on Dhofar in Arabic
Come From Away 
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