Tackling Arabic in Cyberspace

Laying on my desk is a bold yellow and black copy of "Arabic for Dummies," a dependable book touted as a "fun and easy way to start speaking Arabic." I've marked up many of the first few pages with various comments designed to help me better understand the lesson of each chapter. After one month, I'm only on chapter three, but I'm in no hurry. I knew this wouldn't be an easy endeavor. I initially thought I'd try and learn the language the way I'd heard my Spanish-speaking clients tell me they'd learned English-- on the job-- and started out googling a number of basic Arabic websites for simple language instruction. It started out well enough as I learned greetings and expressions that I repeated to the Arabic-speaking men at the immigration detention center where I give "know your rights" presentations. They were receptive to my attempts to speak their language. Inevitably, I'd solicit a sincere smile, maybe a chuckle, and oftentimes a response I could not understand. In turn, they might try to teach me a word or two, or correct my pronunciation. With one, I'd briefly exchanged English words for Arabic words, so that we might both increase our newly acquired foreign vocabularies. I was satisfied that I'd created a degree of connection, and it served as an inspiration to keep moving forward, though at times I felt like I was climbing a thick stone wall and would never reach the other side.


I'd decided to tackle the study of Arabic to create a rapport with clients, especially during the uncertain times for Arabs. Along the way I have wondered whether it made any sense to undertake such a complicated language. I will doubtfully never speak and understand it well enough to fully overcome the language gap, and I was raised speaking English, Spanish and French effortlessly, so it would have been more logical to learn another romance language instead of one that required knowledge of a new alphabet and sounds I have never before made. But I guess with language, logic plays a smaller role than the basic, intimate desire to learn. So I stopped worrying about what made sense.

The "Dummies" book alone could never have gotten me through this particular trial. Luckily, I also have the benefit of a dedicated tutor, and most of my language instruction takes place via the internet. Call it cyber-immersion. So in addition to correcting my grammar and teaching me words, phrases, and sentences which I can dissect to discern nouns and verbs, my tutor, with his broad vision of language learning, sends me to all sorts of websites about the Middle East and the Arab world. These cultural navigations are varied and vibrant. I have read at length about the volatile politics of this newsworthy region, have discovered blogs and short stories describing an array of experiences had by Americans who have lived there, have listened to funky, remixed "debke," and 15th century Andalusian music, have seen exquisite photographs of the land, and have enthusiastically downloaded recipes for baba ghanoush, stuffed grape leaves and baqlawa, all of which I’ve made with varying degrees of success.

Films too are part of the lesson plan, and they serve especially well for learning obscenities and cultural subtleties. I have at least a half dozen Arab-language movies in my Netflix queue. I am exposed to a fantastic brew of facts, ideas, opinions, debates, sounds and visual images to challenge my language education or simply lift me from the tedium of day-to-day grammar lessons. I can wrap my imagination around a beachfront house on the Eastern Mediterranean coast with a small yard full of trees bearing ripe figs, a red poppy blooming on a damp, verdant mountainside, a Crusader fortress or other magnificent structure crumbling ever so slowly in the brittle desert sand, or an enchanting souk filled with vivid colors, musky smells, and impatient Arabic voices steadily rising in the charged air. I must reach deep to summon these images given my inexperience with the subject matter, but when I do, they engulf me, at least for a while, until reality seeps back in to muddy the landscape and halts my lesson for the time being.

My tutor is a serious, albeit charming, teacher, and this is a good quality in a tutor, since language instruction is a serious business. He has developed another unconventional teaching theory which is quite student-friendly. He calls it "the monodose approach to holistic language learning." Go out for a few beers in order to lower all four language skill inhibitions: reading, speaking, listening and writing. Unfortunately, I found that I am not a good learner of anything when under the influence, though I am certainly not opposed to this creative learning opportunity. More recently, I have thought that I might visit the Middle East. Were this to happen, it would undoubtedly complete the language immersion cycle. I would be forced to use my skills to communicate with people in their environment and not mine, even after a few too many drinks.

I met my tutor when he volunteered to act as a translator when I needed to communicate with a client who was detained for removal. From this brief engagement, an unconventional commitment to the Arabic language developed between us, and he became my personal tutor, free-of-charge no less. He is earnest and dedicated to his profession having taught English to Arab speakers in his native country before coming to the U.S. with a prestigious fellowship to earn his doctorate. He provides thoughtful responses to the multitude of inquiries I have related to the language, its culture, politics and people. I am admittedly intrigued by his resonant voice and British-tinged English, and enjoy those occasions when we do meet face-to-face over drinks allegedly for language practice. These meetings add a unique beat to the usual rhythm of my cyber-education, and are a pleasurable distraction from the relatively dry "Dummies" book I pore over regularly to learn the grammatical rules of this enigmatic language.

Whenever I receive an email from my tutor, I know I’m in for an entertaining lesson. I once found "de-arabizing falafel" on the subject line of one such email. Attached was a link to an article about the wholesale Israeli acquisition of falafel, as though Arabs had played no role in the creation of this ancient national dish. Obviously, this article was a metaphor for a greater conflict in the Middle East. Other emails have been entitled "sun and moon letters," regarding the challenges presented by certain letters in the Arabic alphabet; "fertility," addressing Palestinian and Israeli reproductive practices and their broader political implications; and "virtue soup for president," a report on the problems of transliteration during an American electoral campaign. Fortunately, literature is not absent from my instruction since I am an avid reader. Not only have I discovered humorous memoirs by Arab-American writers that expose the nuances of bicultural life in the U.S., but I have added a list of new authors to my already overflowing library: Nawal Saadawi, Sahar Khalifi, Fatema Mernissi. Their names alone require practice by my fossilized tongue.

During a vacation I took to New York City, my tutor coached me so that I could communicate my food order in Arabic to two Egyptian halal cart vendors, Mohammed and Mahmoud. Charmed by my limited Arabic, the halal vendors insisted on teaching me a few words, after announcing proudly that "Arab men verrrry good!" "Oh," I cautiously answered since it was clear that they weren't affirming Arab men's pedagogical abilities, but their prowess in seduction, and I didn't want the conversation to head down that road. They then smiled knowingly at one another, and bantered about in their native language while I strained my ears in a fruitless attempt to understand what they might be devising. "We teach you Arabic," one then repeated to me, while the other nodded vigorously. I hesitated to learn from anyone other than my reliable tutor, and half jokingly had the men assure me that they were not going to teach me dirty words that I might unsuspectingly repeat. Immediately they responded, "no, no, no. Good words--sabah al-nour wal bannour." Turns out that what the vendors taught me was the lovely greeting, "morning of goodwill and flowers." And, of course, the word for "my love," "habeebti."

It was also then, because I had to order food, that I learned the word for eggplant, "al-bazinjan," a word with an apparently ominous meaning in some circles. In a news article I read about the trial of alleged terrorist Jose Padilla, I was informed that this particular term had circulated among the plotters' emails as a code word for "ammunition." It made me wonder whether the innocent emails my tutor and I sent back and forth almost daily in my quest to learn Arabic might not land on some overzealous counterterrorist specialist’s desk, subject to the scrutiny of several domestic intelligence experts in an attempt to de-code any subversive language. The idea that our emails might be intercepted may seem like absurd paranoia in a country that prides itself on freedom of expression, but times are tense and people suspicious. My tutor once told me about an Arab man escorted off a plane because he held in his hand a piece of paper with Arabic text written on it. An anxious passenger sitting next to him tipped off the flight attendant as to her concern. Apparently, it was nothing more than a shopping list, probably scribbled by his wife that morning: "honey, pick up these things on your way home from the airport... diapers, milk, toothpaste, bread..." With this troubling story in the back of my head, I advised my tutor of my concern about eggplant and he immediately suggested that from then on we only use the French word, "aubergine," to detract any pursuit by law enforcement. Needless to say, this advice came to me via the internet in Arabic. Similarly, we are careful never to write via cyberspace about my tutor's parish priest back home, Father Jihad-- yes, Jihad.

My tutor is very thorough in his teaching, even if his pupil is ill-prepared for her lessons. If I once knew what a fricative and a glottal were, I have long forgotten, and this may pose an unfortunate impediment to my acquisition of the Arabic language, since Arabic seems to be full of such sounds. I have been instructed that a certain sound "is given the symbol ħ in the IPA chart, which corresponds to the Arabic letter ﺡ, and that this is a "voiceless pharyngeal fricative." The other one, ﻫ, is symbolized by the H, and is a "voiceless glottal fricative." Same as the previous one, but the tongue is even more neutralized, and similarly, the air comes out of the lungs directly...." I am uncertain what to make of this precise explanation. I am neither familiar with the IPA chart or human vocal cord anatomy. I do recall in first grade learning to read and write in a novel system called "ITA," which was phonetically based such that "people" was written "peepl," but I think the method was quickly abandoned because I have never, ever since met anyone who remembers teaching or learning it. In any case, ITA did not properly prepare me for IPA so I am forced to rely on the simpler explanation in my "Dummies" book on how to make this certain sound. It instructs me to "breathe heavily through the esophagus and then intermittently choke off the airflow so that you create a staccato noise." I am still at a loss. This may be layman’s terminology, but it requires a contortionist vocal ability and perhaps a knowledge of CPR in case I choke off my airflow too aggressively.

Sometimes during my lessons, the world closes in on me and becomes more personal than I would have ever thought. Early on during my Arabic cyber-immersion, I discovered that a maternal great uncle of mine had served in the French military at the time of the First World War and had gone to Syria to defend France's colonialist claim in the region in light of mounting revolt by the indigenous population. As well, I learned that a fiercely pro-Arab French writer, whose framed black and white photo hung for several years on my mother's study wall, prompting me as a child to think he was her ex-boyfriend, not the subject of her doctoral thesis, was in fact the author of a powerful and haunting testimonial of the massacre at Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp, 25 years earlier. So history becomes deeply personal and not just about grand events and dead men, and language gives us access to much more than just other people.