December posting meme: studying Arabic
Okay, obviously, I am not doing these meme exactly on the days I intended. (Although if you asked for a specific day for a reason I'm aware of, I will try to make that day! I know myself too well to outright guarantee.) But I am aiming to do them all, even belatedly, and so! As per 
rymenhild's request, on December 17 today I am talking about my experience with the Arabic language and Arabic-speaking countries.
Hmm. Okay, some background to start off.
I started studying Arabic in high school -- sort of. When I was 16 and we'd just moved to Vermont, I discovered that one of the history teachers was teaching Arabic as sort of an optional club before school. (She had started studying Arabic in adulthood, and I have no idea why, actually.) It wasn't graded, and there was no homework, but three days a week, she opened up her classroom to anyone who wanted to come, and we'd learn the alphabet and how to say exciting things like "this is my chair," and if you came regularly enough it would go on your transcript without grade or credit. I was coming early anyway due to complicated scheduling reasons that meant carpooling with my dad was easiest, so I figured, why not? At that point, I had studied American Sign Language and Latin, so adding on a vocal living language spoken by people in other countries I could visit seemed like a fun change.
I started studying Arabic properly in college. (This was the point at which I learned that my high school class had given me enough background for some help with the alphabet, some help with the slow process of learning to differentiate between letters like ت and ط or ك and ق, and the ability to keep nouns' genders straight -- but not enough background to do things like, oh, use verbs. It was enough to let me coast through about three weeks of college Arabic, in other words.) Honestly, a lot of my motivation there was momentum. I didn't have any other language or region I was more interested in, and I was too contrary to take 'easy' languages like French or Spanish, and I felt that if I wanted to be an International Relations major I would need to decide immediately what language I was studying. (I didn't become an IR major, but for a little while I thought I might, and that had an eight-semester language requirement. Summer classes did not occur to me as an option, as a stressed-out freshman.) My university had a tiny Arabic program at that point, run by one stubborn adjunct who kept the program alive -- this was in 2000, and nobody much was teaching Arabic in the US -- but it existed, and I started taking it. From there, I sort of fell into majoring in Middle Eastern Studies.
The summer before my junior year, I went to Middlebury College's Summer Language Schools, and did their Arabic immersion program. This meant nine weeks of studying Arabic, and speaking only Arabic, all the time; it was the hardest mental work I've ever done, and a tremendous learning experience.
My teacher at my own university was -- well. He was (and is) a lovely fellow, an Iraqi man of great dignity and warmth and intelligence, and what he really should have been doing and what he wanted to be doing was teaching advanced literature classes and maybe some advanced grammar. In more recent years, when the program had grown bigger, he was. But for every class I ever took with him, he was teaching basic language skills, and he shouldn't've been, because he had no skill for it. He didn't believe in conversational practice. He believed in doing lots of translating, to and fro from English, and then reading those sentences aloud. So I came from that (and Latin, which was similar, and ASL, and a semester here or there of this or that) to this immersion program, where we spent all morning in class, and all afternoon doing homework, and all our free time talking with each other about grammar points -- where we were expected to say whatever we wanted to say in whatever laborious, tortured way we could manage to say it, because that was the only way we could talk -- where we breathed Arabic, because that was what we were there for and that was the only language we were allowed to utter for those nine weeks. I spent the first two weeks stressed out, crying in the shower, feeling perpetually behind and adrift, and then the switches clicked over in my brain, and I stopped translating and started hearing. It beat all the shyness about speaking a foreign language out of me, for sure. It was fantastic, in a boot camp kind of way.
And then I spent a semester living in Cairo, which was what I was intending to prepare myself for. I studied at the American University in Cairo, where I took classes in English -- almost everything at AUC is taught in English -- and lived in the dorm, and studied Arabic there too. I didn't travel there as much as I always intended to; I traveled within Egypt, to the White Desert and Sinai and Upper Egypt, and I traveled to Morocco for five days with friends. And then I came home to a snowy January.
A word on language, though. Some of you are probably thinking that from the sound of this, I was excellently well prepared for speaking Arabic all the time in Cairo! And, well. Sort of.
See, Arabic has a lot of dialect variation. Some dialects are similar to each other; others, I'm given to understand, are as different as French and Spanish from each other, to use a very rough analogy. There's also a form called Modern Standard (فصحى, which is literally something like "eloquent" Arabic), which is used for most formal writing (except, say, novels written in colloquial Arabic -- but definitely newspapers, most books, etc), and which newscasters generally speak, and so forth. It's used in formal contexts. It's much closer to classical Arabic than most dialects, and the question of how distinct Modern Standard and classical are is a question for someone much more educated in the nuances than I am, but it definitely preserves a lot of intricacies of grammar which have been dropped from a lot of dialects. Nobody speaks it on the street, though.
It's also what's generally taught in the US. It's what I learned in school; it's what I was speaking all summer at Middlebury. (I'm sure it was a very weird experience for our teachers, and any visitors: all these people wandering about earnestly speaking in broken and accented and highly formal Modern Standard.) Middlebury did teach some colloquial Arabic from various regions, but only to advanced classes. I understand why, I guess -- it is what most writing is in, and it teaches you the structure of Arabic, and in many ways I suspect it's easier to go from Modern Standard to a colloquial dialect than it would be to go the other way as a foreign learner -- but the upshot of that is that I came to Egypt able to muddle my way through a conversation in Modern Standard, and barely able to direct a taxi in Egyptian Arabic. I learned some fast, and could extrapolate a bit more -- a lot of the differences are in the common words like "good" and "yes," and some shifts to pronunciation and verb conjugation -- but I was always pretty stilted.
So that's my background.
I could ramble more about being at AUC, I guess, but I'm not entirely sure what to say. The campus is out in the suburbs now, but at the time it was right in the middle of Cairo, spread out across a few buildings within a block of Tahrir Square. I lived in the dorm, with other foreign students (some from other Arab countries, some exchange students like me) in a rich expat neighborhood on an island in the middle of the Nile -- for the Egyptians, it was mostly a commuter school. We foreigners were the poor kids on campus, surrounded by the children of famous actors and government officials, and rich as soon as we stepped through the door. I spoke halting Arabic to shopkeepers and taxi drivers, and they practiced their English in trade on me. I learned to bargain in the bazaars, and to bargain hard. I can still do off-the-cuff exchange rates between the dollar and the Egyptian pound in my head -- but still at the 2002 exchange rate. I ate ful medames (fava bean paste) and ta3meyya (like falafel, but with fava beans) and koshary (lentils and onions and rice and pasta all heaped in a bowl, with hot sauce), and I miss all three of those still, and if you know of a place in Boston to get koshary I would love to hear from you about it. I studied hieroglyphic, because why not? (We didn't get to verbs there, either, but that was in a whole semester. The writing system is just a tad more complicated than Arabic's, for one thing.) We went on an orientation trip to Sinai and climbed a mountain in the dark and watched the sun rise over mountain monasteries, and I will never forget it. I'll never forget the color of the sky, the palm trees painted white around their trunks, the black-and-white striped curbs, the honks of cars, the feel of riding horseback over the sand with the pyramids in distant view, the taste of sweet hibiscus tea and shisha smoke -- so many tiny sensory details. My parents and three of my five siblings came to visit, at the end of the semester after exams, and I showed them around the city, and we went south to Upper Egypt. None of us had cell phones -- which baffled the Egyptians around me, all of whom had cell phones even then -- and coordination with six people was a headache, but it was marvelous, all of it.
I was frustrated with the school, because it was (mostly) academically easier than I was used to. I got tired of the lack of green things growing wild, but that's what you get when you fill the fertile land with city until it's only desert to the west and east; there were farms north and south, but mostly what I was homesick for was temperate forests, and Egypt has a different beauty. I had friends, despite my introversion. I never felt unsafe or threatened. I did feel conspicuous; I'm tall, and I'm pale and unambiguously Euro-American, and shopkeepers would shout "ya Amrikiyya! [American!]" at me to try to get my attention. (Guessing where foreigners and tourists were from was a common habit of shopkeepers all over.) It's probably good for me to have gotten a taste of feeling that conspicuous, though. I learned to tune out catcalls with my eyes fixed on the middle distance, but that wasn't just me; that was every woman of any age who wasn't a grandmother, really. And Cairo is a huge, crowded city -- this is like studying in Manhattan, and saying you know North America because of it. I wouldn't want to live in Cairo long-term, but then I wouldn't want to live in Manhattan either. I was, and am, glad that I went.
This was in the fall of 2002. People -- taxi drivers, shopkeepers -- would ask me sometimes: "Do you think Bush will bomb Iraq?" Every time, I'd say back, sincerely and helplessly, "I don't know. I hope not. I hope not, but he doesn't listen to me." Several of them were emboldened by this expression of disapproval, and they'd say something like, "Bush, Blair, Mubarak -- we should get rid of them all! They're all bad."
I left in January 2003. Bombs were dropped on Iraq in March.
I never felt unsafe in Cairo. I never felt threatened. I was never sorry I'd come, except when I was feeling homesick or socially lonely. It's kind of sad that I feel the need to stress that, but it's the first and last thing I say, every time. Because I'm talking to (usually white) USAians, and, well. It seems important to say, and to focus on what I enjoyed, and gloss over the things that (due to my school, or just due to being an introverted twenty-year-old living in a foreign country for the first time) I didn't.
The thing is that what my Middle Eastern Studies major, and what living in Cairo, taught me is mostly what I don't know.
People ask me sometimes what I think about this or that political happening in the Middle East, and I have to shrug awkwardly, and say that I don't know enough to really say. I'm not an expert. I have an undergraduate education, which taught me some of the language (most of which I've forgotten in the years of falling out of practice) and some of the history and some of the religions (not all Arabs are Muslim; not all Muslims are Arab), and really taught me a lot of basic facts. A lot of what I know is stuff we ought to learn in elementary school, or at least middle school and high school. It ought to be basic knowledge about an important, ancient, culturally rich region with a whole lot of influence throughout history and into the present. It's not, at least in the USA. But it's what I know.
I'm glad I went to Cairo for a semester. There are things I love about Cairo; it still has a warm place in my heart. But the fondness of someone who came as a foreigner from August to January one year and went away again is not the same as the love of someone who grew up there, lives there, has roots there, has family there, has a personal stake in what it's like on the streets of Cairo or the streets of Alexandria, Port Said, Asyut, Aswan, little villages in oases and scattered along the Nile. It's not my home. It was kind to me and accepted me for a few months. I haven't lived anywhere else in the Middle East at all. I can't claim more than I have a right to.
What I do need to say when people make sweeping generalizations -- and they often do, in the USA, sweeping generalizations in all kinds of directions, when talking about this event or protest or dictator or war or people thousands of miles away -- is to say, no, it's more complicated than that. It's more complicated than that. I dunno, I can't agree with you, stop saying what you're saying, it's more complicated than that.
What I really mean is: it's more human than that. That's what complicated usually means, with human beings.
This entry is also posted at http://genarti.dreamwidth.org/159954.html. You can comment on LJ or DW, whichever you like.
comments at DW.
rymenhild's request, on December 17 today I am talking about my experience with the Arabic language and Arabic-speaking countries.
Hmm. Okay, some background to start off.
I started studying Arabic in high school -- sort of. When I was 16 and we'd just moved to Vermont, I discovered that one of the history teachers was teaching Arabic as sort of an optional club before school. (She had started studying Arabic in adulthood, and I have no idea why, actually.) It wasn't graded, and there was no homework, but three days a week, she opened up her classroom to anyone who wanted to come, and we'd learn the alphabet and how to say exciting things like "this is my chair," and if you came regularly enough it would go on your transcript without grade or credit. I was coming early anyway due to complicated scheduling reasons that meant carpooling with my dad was easiest, so I figured, why not? At that point, I had studied American Sign Language and Latin, so adding on a vocal living language spoken by people in other countries I could visit seemed like a fun change.
I started studying Arabic properly in college. (This was the point at which I learned that my high school class had given me enough background for some help with the alphabet, some help with the slow process of learning to differentiate between letters like ت and ط or ك and ق, and the ability to keep nouns' genders straight -- but not enough background to do things like, oh, use verbs. It was enough to let me coast through about three weeks of college Arabic, in other words.) Honestly, a lot of my motivation there was momentum. I didn't have any other language or region I was more interested in, and I was too contrary to take 'easy' languages like French or Spanish, and I felt that if I wanted to be an International Relations major I would need to decide immediately what language I was studying. (I didn't become an IR major, but for a little while I thought I might, and that had an eight-semester language requirement. Summer classes did not occur to me as an option, as a stressed-out freshman.) My university had a tiny Arabic program at that point, run by one stubborn adjunct who kept the program alive -- this was in 2000, and nobody much was teaching Arabic in the US -- but it existed, and I started taking it. From there, I sort of fell into majoring in Middle Eastern Studies.
The summer before my junior year, I went to Middlebury College's Summer Language Schools, and did their Arabic immersion program. This meant nine weeks of studying Arabic, and speaking only Arabic, all the time; it was the hardest mental work I've ever done, and a tremendous learning experience.
My teacher at my own university was -- well. He was (and is) a lovely fellow, an Iraqi man of great dignity and warmth and intelligence, and what he really should have been doing and what he wanted to be doing was teaching advanced literature classes and maybe some advanced grammar. In more recent years, when the program had grown bigger, he was. But for every class I ever took with him, he was teaching basic language skills, and he shouldn't've been, because he had no skill for it. He didn't believe in conversational practice. He believed in doing lots of translating, to and fro from English, and then reading those sentences aloud. So I came from that (and Latin, which was similar, and ASL, and a semester here or there of this or that) to this immersion program, where we spent all morning in class, and all afternoon doing homework, and all our free time talking with each other about grammar points -- where we were expected to say whatever we wanted to say in whatever laborious, tortured way we could manage to say it, because that was the only way we could talk -- where we breathed Arabic, because that was what we were there for and that was the only language we were allowed to utter for those nine weeks. I spent the first two weeks stressed out, crying in the shower, feeling perpetually behind and adrift, and then the switches clicked over in my brain, and I stopped translating and started hearing. It beat all the shyness about speaking a foreign language out of me, for sure. It was fantastic, in a boot camp kind of way.
And then I spent a semester living in Cairo, which was what I was intending to prepare myself for. I studied at the American University in Cairo, where I took classes in English -- almost everything at AUC is taught in English -- and lived in the dorm, and studied Arabic there too. I didn't travel there as much as I always intended to; I traveled within Egypt, to the White Desert and Sinai and Upper Egypt, and I traveled to Morocco for five days with friends. And then I came home to a snowy January.
A word on language, though. Some of you are probably thinking that from the sound of this, I was excellently well prepared for speaking Arabic all the time in Cairo! And, well. Sort of.
See, Arabic has a lot of dialect variation. Some dialects are similar to each other; others, I'm given to understand, are as different as French and Spanish from each other, to use a very rough analogy. There's also a form called Modern Standard (فصحى, which is literally something like "eloquent" Arabic), which is used for most formal writing (except, say, novels written in colloquial Arabic -- but definitely newspapers, most books, etc), and which newscasters generally speak, and so forth. It's used in formal contexts. It's much closer to classical Arabic than most dialects, and the question of how distinct Modern Standard and classical are is a question for someone much more educated in the nuances than I am, but it definitely preserves a lot of intricacies of grammar which have been dropped from a lot of dialects. Nobody speaks it on the street, though.
It's also what's generally taught in the US. It's what I learned in school; it's what I was speaking all summer at Middlebury. (I'm sure it was a very weird experience for our teachers, and any visitors: all these people wandering about earnestly speaking in broken and accented and highly formal Modern Standard.) Middlebury did teach some colloquial Arabic from various regions, but only to advanced classes. I understand why, I guess -- it is what most writing is in, and it teaches you the structure of Arabic, and in many ways I suspect it's easier to go from Modern Standard to a colloquial dialect than it would be to go the other way as a foreign learner -- but the upshot of that is that I came to Egypt able to muddle my way through a conversation in Modern Standard, and barely able to direct a taxi in Egyptian Arabic. I learned some fast, and could extrapolate a bit more -- a lot of the differences are in the common words like "good" and "yes," and some shifts to pronunciation and verb conjugation -- but I was always pretty stilted.
So that's my background.
I could ramble more about being at AUC, I guess, but I'm not entirely sure what to say. The campus is out in the suburbs now, but at the time it was right in the middle of Cairo, spread out across a few buildings within a block of Tahrir Square. I lived in the dorm, with other foreign students (some from other Arab countries, some exchange students like me) in a rich expat neighborhood on an island in the middle of the Nile -- for the Egyptians, it was mostly a commuter school. We foreigners were the poor kids on campus, surrounded by the children of famous actors and government officials, and rich as soon as we stepped through the door. I spoke halting Arabic to shopkeepers and taxi drivers, and they practiced their English in trade on me. I learned to bargain in the bazaars, and to bargain hard. I can still do off-the-cuff exchange rates between the dollar and the Egyptian pound in my head -- but still at the 2002 exchange rate. I ate ful medames (fava bean paste) and ta3meyya (like falafel, but with fava beans) and koshary (lentils and onions and rice and pasta all heaped in a bowl, with hot sauce), and I miss all three of those still, and if you know of a place in Boston to get koshary I would love to hear from you about it. I studied hieroglyphic, because why not? (We didn't get to verbs there, either, but that was in a whole semester. The writing system is just a tad more complicated than Arabic's, for one thing.) We went on an orientation trip to Sinai and climbed a mountain in the dark and watched the sun rise over mountain monasteries, and I will never forget it. I'll never forget the color of the sky, the palm trees painted white around their trunks, the black-and-white striped curbs, the honks of cars, the feel of riding horseback over the sand with the pyramids in distant view, the taste of sweet hibiscus tea and shisha smoke -- so many tiny sensory details. My parents and three of my five siblings came to visit, at the end of the semester after exams, and I showed them around the city, and we went south to Upper Egypt. None of us had cell phones -- which baffled the Egyptians around me, all of whom had cell phones even then -- and coordination with six people was a headache, but it was marvelous, all of it.
I was frustrated with the school, because it was (mostly) academically easier than I was used to. I got tired of the lack of green things growing wild, but that's what you get when you fill the fertile land with city until it's only desert to the west and east; there were farms north and south, but mostly what I was homesick for was temperate forests, and Egypt has a different beauty. I had friends, despite my introversion. I never felt unsafe or threatened. I did feel conspicuous; I'm tall, and I'm pale and unambiguously Euro-American, and shopkeepers would shout "ya Amrikiyya! [American!]" at me to try to get my attention. (Guessing where foreigners and tourists were from was a common habit of shopkeepers all over.) It's probably good for me to have gotten a taste of feeling that conspicuous, though. I learned to tune out catcalls with my eyes fixed on the middle distance, but that wasn't just me; that was every woman of any age who wasn't a grandmother, really. And Cairo is a huge, crowded city -- this is like studying in Manhattan, and saying you know North America because of it. I wouldn't want to live in Cairo long-term, but then I wouldn't want to live in Manhattan either. I was, and am, glad that I went.
This was in the fall of 2002. People -- taxi drivers, shopkeepers -- would ask me sometimes: "Do you think Bush will bomb Iraq?" Every time, I'd say back, sincerely and helplessly, "I don't know. I hope not. I hope not, but he doesn't listen to me." Several of them were emboldened by this expression of disapproval, and they'd say something like, "Bush, Blair, Mubarak -- we should get rid of them all! They're all bad."
I left in January 2003. Bombs were dropped on Iraq in March.
I never felt unsafe in Cairo. I never felt threatened. I was never sorry I'd come, except when I was feeling homesick or socially lonely. It's kind of sad that I feel the need to stress that, but it's the first and last thing I say, every time. Because I'm talking to (usually white) USAians, and, well. It seems important to say, and to focus on what I enjoyed, and gloss over the things that (due to my school, or just due to being an introverted twenty-year-old living in a foreign country for the first time) I didn't.
The thing is that what my Middle Eastern Studies major, and what living in Cairo, taught me is mostly what I don't know.
People ask me sometimes what I think about this or that political happening in the Middle East, and I have to shrug awkwardly, and say that I don't know enough to really say. I'm not an expert. I have an undergraduate education, which taught me some of the language (most of which I've forgotten in the years of falling out of practice) and some of the history and some of the religions (not all Arabs are Muslim; not all Muslims are Arab), and really taught me a lot of basic facts. A lot of what I know is stuff we ought to learn in elementary school, or at least middle school and high school. It ought to be basic knowledge about an important, ancient, culturally rich region with a whole lot of influence throughout history and into the present. It's not, at least in the USA. But it's what I know.
I'm glad I went to Cairo for a semester. There are things I love about Cairo; it still has a warm place in my heart. But the fondness of someone who came as a foreigner from August to January one year and went away again is not the same as the love of someone who grew up there, lives there, has roots there, has family there, has a personal stake in what it's like on the streets of Cairo or the streets of Alexandria, Port Said, Asyut, Aswan, little villages in oases and scattered along the Nile. It's not my home. It was kind to me and accepted me for a few months. I haven't lived anywhere else in the Middle East at all. I can't claim more than I have a right to.
What I do need to say when people make sweeping generalizations -- and they often do, in the USA, sweeping generalizations in all kinds of directions, when talking about this event or protest or dictator or war or people thousands of miles away -- is to say, no, it's more complicated than that. It's more complicated than that. I dunno, I can't agree with you, stop saying what you're saying, it's more complicated than that.
What I really mean is: it's more human than that. That's what complicated usually means, with human beings.
This entry is also posted at http://genarti.dreamwidth.org/159954.html. You can comment on LJ or DW, whichever you like.
comments at DW.