Zurich - Arabic Classes

Volkshochschule, Zurich

I didn’t want to lose what little Egyptian Arabic I’d learned over the last year or so; indeed, I would really like to progress, if at all possible.

It was a bit tricky deciding how to go about this. I thought about a personal instructor, but that was very expensive. Also, the more I thought about it, the more unsure I was about what exactly I wanted out of the classes (it was a natural question for them to ask of me!). I wanted to know too many things and I didn’t know what to prioritise.

I would really like to be able to read Arabic fluently and understand the television. If I could do that, I could quickly improve. However, the dialect spoken on television changes depending on which country’s channel you are watching. I believe the news is in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Most subtitles on films and most writing is in MSA.

I also want to understand the people in Egypt when they are speaking so that I can regain a sense of control in situations and feel I can halfway belong. I want to speak their language and not seem such an idiot or seem so rude by demanding they speak English. But Egyptian Arabic is a world away from MSA.

The more I looked into it, the more difficult it was. MSA has more rules and is more difficult, but is what everyone learns. However, no-one speaks it. It’s not even like High German, where at least the Germans speak German, so if you learn German in Switzerland, even though you may not understand the Swiss-German speakers, you will be able to read things and you just need to cross the border and everyone’s speaking the language you learned. For Arabic, you learn MSA, go to an Arabic country, and they’re all speaking something completely different, and different from each other, too. And none of it is MSA. Help!

In the Arabic countries, so I understand, each nation speaks its own language but calls it Arabic, and no-one speaks MSA. All writing and maybe some TV is in MSA, though. So what’s it best for me to learn?

I ended up deciding on a course on MSA – it was cheaper than private tuition in Egyptian Arabic (it also seemed too bizarre to pay Swiss prices for tuition that would be cheaper in Egypt) and I decided it would do me no harm to learn what they all learn at school. I didn’t want to start at the very beginning again, so I jumped in at second semester.

I felt a bit nervous about it as I was in among all the Swiss people, so I was dealing with two foreign languages all at once. And, of course, I was entering a class where everyone already knew each other and everyone had exactly the same background of Arabic learning. Apart from me.

Tom and Kath had given me a CD of Arabic, so I worked through that religiously for two weeks before starting. It wasn’t until it was time for me to start the classes that I suddenly realised it wasn’t MSA but was Arabic in the Levant. So, it was different from Egyptian Arabic, but still wasn’t MSA. Ugh.

But how different can it really be? I’d surely be OK. Especially now that I had a smattering of two different types of Arabic already.

Fortunately, the class was in High German, so I had no problems understanding the teacher. The class was quite small – only 8 of us and I was the only foreigner. The small group made it a bit easier. I was delighted when he started off saying we would learn past tense by the end of the semester, but he since seems to have completely forgotten that (although, he just started it again last week).

Anyway, the first class was a complete shock to me. It was all so very different from what I’d learned. “What’s your name?” was different (I’d originally thought, when I tried speaking to Yasser in Arabic, that he had been being difficult by putting on a strange accent that I couldn’t understand – I now realise he was speaking MSA to me rather than the Egyptian Arabic that I’d been learning). The word for “yes” was different (Safi had already told me this and I’d seen it from reading TV subtitles), you say “how are you?” in a completely different way, the word for “what” was new, as was the word for “teacher”, “friend”, oh, just so many terms that I thought I knew and now I didn’t; some words were the same but pronounced quite differently. I felt quite lost as I just didn’t know much of the vocabulary at all. They’d also learned quite a lot of words I’d never taught myself (for one word I didn’t even know the German!).

We were also reading from Arabic script. I was pretty impressed that they’d learned that within one semester, but I found myself struggling because I had the disadvantage of not knowing the words in the first place. Also, they’ve been learning to read with the vowels included (which are usually omitted), which I hadn’t learned, so I’ve had to pick that up as I’ve gone along.

It was interesting to be in a class, though, as you get extra information and you can ask questions. I learned that Al Jazeera means The Island, Algeria in Arabic is the word for “The Islands”, and that the Taliban means “the students”, which I’m sure I knew, but I’d completely forgotten, but now makes a lot more sense.

Anyway, I felt renewed enthusiasm after my first class and so I signed up for the whole semester. Let’s see how it goes.