El Andalous - Learning Egyptian Arabic (Chapters 9-14)

Getting Around in Sahl Hasheesh

OK. I admit it. I’ve fallen a bit behind on my Egyptian Arabic. I’m not quite sure how, but it’s probably because I’ve taken on the three writing courses instead. My final writing course ends this week, so maybe I will get back to learning Egyptian Arabic in earnest. It’s not that I haven’t done any; it’s just been rather sporadic.

I am, however, prepared for progress. I’ve bought myself a follow-up book (Early Intermediate Egyptian Arabic). Being the ambitious person that I am, I couldn’t help but peek ahead to see what I would learn and was a bit horrified to find that I couldn’t even get started with it.

The next book is all in Arabic script. I knew this when I bought it and I thought it would be fine as it would force me to struggle through. However, I’d failed to take into account that even the grammar would be explained in Arabic script and the vocabulary for that is beyond me at this stage. Even looking at the easiest dialogue, which is actually very basic compared to my current book, I couldn’t make out a single word. It was a bit depressing.

Anyway, it got me back to going through my current book. I’ve now pretty much finished it, although, to be honest, I haven’t focused too hard on learning the declination of the verbs in the past tense. I’ve looked at it and understood how it works (it’s not difficult), but my main aim is really to get a general understanding in the first instance rather than to speak grammatically correct language, so I would rather spend time on gaining more vocabulary and just recognising the verbs when they happen.

Arabic continues to surprise me with its weirdness. Look at this, for example. In the singular, nouns can be masculine or feminine and their corresponding verbs, adjectives, pronouns etc will all take the relevant, singular, masculine or feminine form. This is standard for most languages. But in Arabic once any non-human word (eg, objects, ideas) becomes plural, it’s always treated as if it is feminine singular. That’s not normal! The plural is used only for humans or human nouns (the word “teams”, I think, takes the plural, because a team is made up of humans). It makes me wonder why I spent all that time learning the plural since you hardly ever need to use it.

Another blow to my progress happened when I discovered that I pretty much have to learn the past form separately for each verb. There’s a lot of rote learning in Arabic! I spent ages drumming in the masculine and feminine words for each of the major colours and I still can’t really remember them. Anyway, the past form does at least look similar to the present form (for instance yinzil is to get down and the past stem is nizil; yishrab is to drink and the past form is shirib; yaakul is to eat and the past stem is kal), but I still need to learn them all. I’ve tried, but like the colours, I suspect a lot of it hasn’t really stuck. I think I will only “get” it with practice as it’s too hard to learn just in the abstract. This is where I miss being at school, where you had writing exercises and you had to try speaking your own sentences. There are exercises in the book, which are helpful, but none of them are writing exercises (because it’s not until the end that you’ve learned all the letters of the alphabet).

My heart also sank when the book went through the ten basic forms of verbs, which are supposed to help you guess the meaning if you don't know a word (because the verb form tells you whether it’s a verb about doing something to someone, to yourself, with someone etc). As far as I can see, these ten forms are impossible to memorise. I think it will be easier to pick it up intuitively as I go along.

For instance, if C stands for any random consonant, a Form 1 verb is yiCaCCac or yiCaCCCaC; Form 2 is yiCaaCCCaaCaC and so on for ten different combinations. Ugh!

This is why I think it’s easier to learn through reading and seeing more vocabulary in a breadth of contexts. I’m sure it will stick in and become more obvious once I can read. I have been trying to improve my reading, but I’ll leave that for another blog.