Me Talk Pretty Never: Learning Arabic, part 1

The first authentic (not classroom) Arabic I understood was in a grocery store: an Omani man asked a clerk “wayn shokolata?” (where’s the chocolate?). I think it was very fitting that my first identification involved candy. It is also fitting that there wasn’t a verb.

Arabic is the fourth foreign language I have studied and, given that I am dyslexic and didn’t really start learning it until I was 42 years old, I am stuck at an odd mix of linguistic abilities. I have inadvertently created my own pidgin.

I know hundreds of Arabic nouns. From teaching literature and metaphors, I know colors, animals, birds and geographical features, but I never remember the words for parts of the body such as arm, foot and ears. I know “eyes” because you need it for metaphors of love, but I have no idea about nose or fingers. I know many words for furniture, types of food, rooms in the house and clothes, but I don’t know the word for “fork.”

I know pronouns and lots of adjectives and thank heavens you don’t need the verb “to be” for basic Arabic sentences: just give a pronoun or noun and a modifier: I happy/ he sick

I can rarely conjugate the verbs ‘to go’ and ‘come’ as fast as I need them so I make do with a pronoun, preposition, noun and time-markers: I to store yesterday. It’s incorrect but I can make myself understood in most situations.

After I had been in Oman for 7 years, I paid for an intensive, 6-week, Arabic language summer school in Muscat. All the students lived in an apartment building and took the bus to school every morning – it was like being in summer camp.

When I got back to Dhofar, the first time I met the research guys I ended up (I can’t remember why) explaining the story of Joseph from the Bible. It was the first time I could do an extended story in Arabic and from then on, I gained more and more confidence telling stories and having long conversations and arguments. I paid for another 4-week Arabic language program at the same school the following year and solidified my low intermediate status.

Now I can talk for hours in Arabic with the research guys, but our communication has aspects of a personal language. For example the verb for “talk” has the root of t-k-l-m, and I grasped that as tatakeleum not conjugated, not inflected for gender or tense – whenever I needed to express anything to do with speech, I throw in that word and they extrapolate the meaning.

And then there is learning in the opposite direction, when you are a native speaker of English on the Arabian Peninsula, you are always relearning your own language. When I bought a slice of “coffee cake” I was surprised that it tasted like… coffee. “Coffee cake” is not supposed to taste like coffee; it’s supposed to taste like butter-sugar-flour-eggs-cinnamon.

When female students said: “My mister told me” I assumed they meant husband or father, but they meant teacher. And I had to grit my teeth at being called “Miss,” not “Miss” with my last name, just “Miss.”

And I had to reexplain English to my students, such as the fact that that they could not use the fun cuss words they heard in movies and songs in the classroom. It was so amusing when a shy, quiet student who never wanted to speak in class would yell “#&*)!” when their books slid off the desk. “No,” I would say shaking my head, “you can’t say that at the university.”

We also a lot of time delineating bear/ bare – profit/ prophet – fair/ fare – merry/ marry/ Mary. I clarify that “I’m sorry” in English means “I am not happy to hear your bad news”; in Arabic it means “I am entirely responsible for the negative event that occurred.” So in English if you tell me your father is sick, I say “I’m sorry” but if I say that to someone in Dhofar they will respond, “Why? You don’t make him ill.” And “How are you?” in English means “I am not planning to slap you in the next five minutes,” not “please tell me all the details of your life.”

But with all my efforts to translation words and meanings, I am often happy to have a language barrier. Sitting in cafés amidst a swirl of languages is relaxing; I don’t have to focus on what someone else is talking about. On picnics, the research guys chat in Gibali, and I could just admire the stars. A few times one of them would offer to teach me Gibali, but an unwritten language is a bridge too far for me.

Adjusting to Oman: My Dangerous Taxi

New Essay: “Ṭâ Is For Talisman” on The Arabic Alphabet website

Practicalities: Managing a Short Business Trip to the Arabian Peninsula

Bibliography for ‘Researching and Working on the Arabian Peninsula’ (2025, Palgrave Macmillan)