Learning Arabic

You may wonder why Lorraine and I are starting to learn Arabic. After all, if you read my post of March 7, you will have deduced that in five years in Istanbul I didn’t learn an awful lot of Turkish, and Turkish, since Ataturk’s time, is written in Roman rather than Arabic characters, which should have made it that much easier to pick up. I did take lessons from very good teachers there, but I didn’t do my homework and didn’t practice as I needed to, and thus didn’t make it over the hump to where I could get beyond the essentials in the language. The agglutinative nature of Turkish makes it a difficult language to learn, but still we both had the opportunity over five years to learn it well…and didn’t!

Why Arabic then? Our good friend Rick tried to learn it and quit, even though he is multilingual, speaks Turkish fluently, and understands its rules and structures better than many Turks at our former school; in fact it was not at all unusual for Turkish teachers to come to Rick with questions about grammar and appropriate structures in their own language. So Rick, the master of many languages, started to learn Arabic and gave it up. He told me that he stopped because he “found the pronunciation absolutely daunting, mostly because of those horrendous pharyngeal sounds”.

So, even given the steep odds of pronunciation, difficulty of reading, Rick’s example, and our lack of success with Turkish, we are going to try to learn some Arabic. Lorraine and I have been practicing making those difficult sounds ourselves using online lessons. She is way ahead of me in that process, though we are both still in Lesson 1, and I can often hear her repeating her exotic (but not horrendous) “pharyngeal sounds” to the screen of the computer in the other room. I do practice writing and saying my letters, but I am still far behind.

You might ask why we bother, especially since English has developed into the lingua franca of many tourist spots and guides, and our Bedouin friends in Syria mostly speak enough English for us to communicate what we want, or at least need, to. A clue for our interest lies in one of my journals where Farag, our guide from Qasr Farafra in the Western Desert of Egypt, signed his name a few years ago. It was at my request, as I was jotting notes on the day we spent with him in the White Desert and Farag was boiling some tea in the small black pot he brought along. I asked because I have always loved the look of Arabic script and wanted to watch his careful hand move the pencil from right to left, forming those lovely letters. That signature is a marker for us, and a possible destination.

We would both dearly love to be able to look at the Arabic on highway signs and shops and menus with at least a little more understanding of what it says, and we work on phrases to be able to communicate, if only at a rudimentary level, with the people we know (and those we have yet to meet) in Syria, Oman, Jordan, and when the opportunity occurs, the beautiful country of Lebanon.

So I will do my homework and will let you know how it goes! Until then,أتمنى لك نهارا سعيدا