Zurich - Arabic, Third Semester

View from the Class Window

Well, after putting in some work to catch up on the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) vocabulary as opposed to “dialect” as our teacher insists on calling Egyptian Arabic, I finished the second semester and decided I may as well carry on. By the end of the semester, there were only four of us left from the eight who were there on my first lesson (so, only three of the original attendees). However, we’ve been joined by three others mid-way (one of whom has also dropped out), which I found quite surprising as I thought there wouldn't be many people who already had a smattering of Arabic.

Progress is frustratingly slow – we’re in the third semester and only now are we starting on verbs. On the plus side, I think my reading has improved quite a bit. I’m definitely faster and a lot of the time now I can both read and understand at the same time. They are only simple texts, of course.

It's interesting learning a different way of thinking about things. In German-speaking countries, it’s customary to call a woman “Frau” (“Mrs”) after she reaches a certain age. In Arabic countries, if a woman is single, you should always use “Miss”, because to call her “Mrs” is to take away from her the possibility of finding a husband. Unlike in European or Western countries, it’s a compliment in Arabic-speaking countries to be called “grandmother”; you’d rather call someone “grandmother” than underestimate her seniority. The language, too, continues to surprise. It has three different words for "not" - one for use in the present, one in the past, and one in the future. I've never seen that before!

Anyway, we’re now a class of six and we’re all the keener ones, so I’m hoping that we might be able to learn a bit faster. The class is only ever as fast as the slowest person and I have a horrible feeling that sometimes that’s been me. I was a bit mystified as to how everyone was so good until I realized that they were all putting in quite a bit of work in between lessons (we don’t get homework). I hurriedly spent our half-term vacation trying to catch up. However, the other week was one of those lessons where I noticed that my lack of time to do some rote learning was becoming evident!

It’s also complicated by me working from German to Arabic and not from my mother tongue to Arabic. When we were learning numbers (which I already knew, although they were pronounced differently in MSA), the teacher reeled off his telephone number in Arabic and asked us to put it into our own phones. Arabic numbers are like in German (“three and twenty” instead of “twenty three”), so I was confused in my head as to whether it was easier to try to translate from Arabic into German, But when I did that, I realised I couldn't enter the number on the phone by writing down 3 and then backtracking to enter the 2 (for 23). So, actually, it was quicker to do it just straight into English. But I didn’t have enough time to think all that through and I'd lost the plot in the mean time! Apparently, numbers are pretty much hard-wired into your brain as to how you first learned them, which is why they are often not so fluent as the rest of a foreign language that you learn.

I'm also getting confused in class with the verbs. I’m not sure if it’s partly because it’s all in German again, since by the time I’ve tried to follow what he’s saying in German and what he wants in Arabic and then how I should say it in Arabic, it all gets a bit much. It’s all fine in my head when I’m doing it at home but somehow in class I panic and it all escapes me. 

Maybe it would be easier if he could just ask us to translate a given sentence, but it’s often explained in a contorted manner (eg, “you are talking to me, and I’m in a group, and let’s pretend the group has ten boys and ten girls, so what do you say to me if you’re asking me whether we’re going to the cinema?”. He’s wanting the sentence “are you (men and women, plural) going to the cinema?” but by the end of the sentence I’m thinking he wants me to say “are we going to the cinema?” because I’ve lost the plot). Having said that, somehow, it still takes me a while to work out which part of the verb he wants even when he does just directly ask me to say “are you (men and women) going to the cinema?” I'm actually not that good at retaining things in my head (which is why I like the written word). So if the sentence is at all complicated, I also stumble  (eg, “he knows her and she knows him”). I’m not sure if I would find it easier if he were speaking English, since the sentence is easy enough for me to understand, so maybe it's just me!

Anyway, those are the challenges, but I do feel I am improving! I'm slowly learning new vocabulary, the classes each week push me to keep up and do some preparatory work, my reading is definitely getting better, and I'm fired up that we're now doing verbs.