El Andalous - Learning to Read

El Andalous - Engineering Office

My French took a big leap forward when I started to read in French; and at one point in my youth I was an avid reader of French literature in the original language. I don’t think I could even attempt to understand a novel in French now.

Anyway, I’m keen to get to the stage where I can read Arabic as I’m convinced this will help me make quick progress in vocabulary and in getting a sense of the grammar. After the shock from looking at my Early Intermediate Egyptian Arabic book, I remembered that I’d always intended on going through all the Arabic scripts of the dialogues at the back of my current book to help me get a handle on reading before I did anything else.

Surely, once I could read all the dialogues in Arabic script in my current book, I should be able to move onto the second book?

Learning to read Arabic reminds me of being a child. I’m having to internally utter each syllable and then work out how to put those syllables together to form a word. It takes forever! Was it really this hard work as a child? I guess it must have been. Having said that, I would have had the advantage of total immersion in the language that I don’t have here.

At first, I found it impossible to read the first dialogue of my current book in Arabic script. I just couldn’t get it. I don’t know why. However, I’m not sure what happened, but one day, it suddenly clicked. Not in the sense that I could suddenly read, but somehow I could, with great effort, work my way through those four lines of text and get them to match up to what the dialogue actually was.

I’m now up to Unit 5 (out of 14) and I am getting better, so it’s quite rewarding. However, it probably takes me an hour’s solid concentration to get through two dialogues of ten lines each. As I mentioned before, Arabic is written in a kind of text format – for instance, the Engineering Room next to my flat is labelled “engnrng” (see photo). So, it’s like you expend a lot of effort just to get a clue as to what the word is. Once you have the clue, you still have to work out what the full word is. And, of course, if your vocabulary isn’t so great, you don’t even know if it’s a word that you have a cat in hell’s chance of guessing.

Sometimes, I get the letters right, but I still don’t guess the word correctly. This is frustrating, because if I can’t do it even when I do know the words, what chance do I have when I don’t know them? For example, I failed to realise that my transliteration of “awm leet” was “omelette” and I had tarabayza (table) as trbyz and couldn’t make the link. Once I looked up the “answer”, it seemed so obvious!

I can remember as a child reading words that I didn’t know, but I can’t remember reading words and not knowing whether I knew them or not. Perhaps this is special to Arabic? On the other hand, I suspect the sensation of saying all the right sounds and not getting the word is something that I did as a child as well. I wish I could remember more clearly what it was like to learn to read, but I think some of those memories are coming back as I try to learn to read Arabic.

When I’m watching films on TV, I often try to see if I can read any of the Arabic subtitles. Honestly, it completely amazes me how fast humans can read. It seems absolutely impossible to me that anyone could have read all that Arabic script in the space of a few seconds, but then occasionally up pops some English subtitles and I realise I need only glance at them to understand the text. It’s mind-boggling how fast the brain can process. However, I’m pretty chuffed as these days I can on the rare occasion decipher a word or two on the subtitles, so that’s another sign of progress.

Another problem with Arabic script is that many of the letters are very similar, so I often have to squint to see, for example, if a letter is a u with one dot underneath (a “b”) or a u with two dots underneath (a “y” or an “ee”). Sometimes, the two dots are written as a dash and it’s equally hard to tell whether I’m looking at a dash or a dot. I guess that once you have a large vocabulary, it’s much easier to tell as you would know that there is no word that would have a “b” in that position, for example. For now, though, it’s tricky!

An additional difficulty is that when some pairs of letters are joined, they sometimes change to a different shape. The letters “l” and “a”, for instance, form a separate letter that’s not in the alphabet. This is something I’ve had to pick up, since I’ve learned only the alphabet. I’m sure there are other ones I’m missing, since I’m certain I’ve seen an o with three dots on top, but this letter doesn’t exist (I think I’ve now worked out that this is a “v” to transliterate European text for a letter that doesn’t exist in Arabic).

Also, as soon as script becomes anything like calligraphy or of a special design, I’m lost. It needs to be in the standard shape for me to recognise it at this stage. You don’t realise how much of a liberty is taken with the alphabet until you’re not familiar with one and you struggle to cope. Is that squiggle supposed to be a letter or is it just a decorative flair?

I was at the KFC the other day (surprise!), and I tried reading the Arabic script under “KFC” on the umbrella. It was the mirror image, so it took me a while to work out that I was reading the word back-to-front because Arabic is written from right-to-left, so it will be reverse in reverse (if you get what I mean!). All these little things that you do automatically when you know the alphabet (it’s relatively easy to read mirror-image English) become very difficult when you don’t!