The other day whilst trying to set up an appointment to discuss a project with our associate chair, she mentioned casually that she couldn’t meet one afternoon because she was supposed to be on Wisconsin Public Radio.

“Really?  Why?”
“I’m … not actually sure,” she said.  “They want to talk about learning Arabic?”

Well, the interview is now online, and it’s quite the doozy.  For those not inclined to listen to the whole 54 minutes, the first five will do it — it’s long enough to establish the following:

1. The woman doing the interview is a complete idiot.
2. The woman doing the interview did absolutely no research on how to pronounce the name of the book that she’s supposedly basing the entire interview around (“Al-Kitaab fi ta’alum al-’arabiyya” — she shortens it to “Al-Kitaab,” which means “the book” and would be pronounced as a mashup of the two common English words “kit” and “tab” as they are pronounced by Americans.  Not only can she not do this, she actually changes the way she pronounces it over the course of the hour several times).
3. The woman doing the interview clearly did not ask one of her interviewees, Mahmoud al-Batal, how to pronounce his name, as she consistently pronounces it wrong (and, again, her pronunciation changes over the course of the hour) — which, I’m sorry, is a horribly egregious error.  I’ve had people make sure they’re pronouncing MY name correctly before, and my name is pretty damned easy.
4. The goal of the interview is to make learning Arabic sound as difficult as humanly possible.  Whether this was the stated goal or not, I don’t know, but I was alternately amused and astonished by her inability to move beyond the fact that Arabic is read and written from right-to-left (and also to find out exactly why this is — including, if possible, assigning personal blame for it).

My favorite part of the hour is that you can practically hear the two interviewees looking at each other and trying to nonverbally work out how to respond without calling the interviewer a complete moron.

Anyway, for those who are so inclined, here are some reflections about learning Arabic that I’d like to share.  This is based not only on my knee jerk reaction to this interview, but from the 16 years of experience I’ve had being a white guy learning and speaking Arabic and responding to  questions from those who do not.

Things that are not actually difficult about learning Arabic as a foreign language.

1. The alphabet (more correctly in this case, it’s an abjad).  Arabic has an actual alphabet.  Each letter stands for a specific consonant sound.  It’s not written in characters.  Once you learn the alphabet–which took about three weeks when I started, but that’s because Arabic 101 only met twice a week–it’s a non-issue, and you don’t have to revisit it ever again unless you decide to take up a language that uses the same alphabet but has more letters (Persian, Urdu, and Malaysian, for example), in which case you’ll have to learn the new letters.  It’s really not that hard.

2. Arabic is always written in cursive — even when it’s printed or typed.  It was bewildering the first time that my Arabic instructor, having taught us the letters a, l, k, t, and b (ا ل ك ت ب) put them all together to form “alktab” (al-kitaab, الكتاب), “the book”.  You stare at it for about 10 seconds, and then it clicks.  By the end of the first class of 101, this is not an issue anymore.  I’ve done this with 6th graders.  They can get it.  It’s really not that hard.

Explaining this to Hollywood, on the other hand, is another story.  I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve seen Arabic text in the background that doesn’t connect — which, frankly, renders the text unreadable.  Most recently, some characters on the show “FlashForward” traveled to Hong Kong looking for Shohreh Aghdashloo (who must be desperate for work), and stopped by an Iranian restaurant she was known to frequent.  The restaurant’s sign was in English and Persian (written with the Arabic alphabet) … and the Persian letters didn’t connect.

I also once saw improperly formed Arabic tatooed on a guy in a Sean Cody video.  Poor guy.

3. Sounds that aren’t in English. Once you learn how to say them properly, you get over it.  However, contrary to popular belief, there are actually four H sounds in Arabic, and only one of them sounds like forming a spit ball.  The alphabet is fully phonetic — every letter has one sound.  And it’s always the same sound.  Unlike English.  Contemplate, if you will, the utter uselessness of the letters c and x sometime — both simply replicate sounds produced by other letters — x has no unique functions (it can be represented as “eks”), and c’s only unique function is in the syllable “ch” as in “choose”.  K and q aren’t as differentiated as they ought to be — as in, for example, the Arabic ك  and ق

4. Reading and writing from right to left. Although our interviewer gets hung up on this, it’s probably the biggest non-issue of them all.  It just is.

5. The lack of a “be” verb. There is no verb “to be” in Arabic (it’s a Semitic language quirk — there isn’t one in Hebrew, either).  “be” is implied.  To say you’re a student, you say, انا طالب, which is literally “I student.”  The “am” is implied.

Things that are more difficult about learning Arabic as a foreign language.

1. The non-writing of vowels. Like every other Semitic language out there (except, apparently, Amharic, which at some point gave in), along with a number of other languages that use abjads, vowels — specifically short vowels — are not written.  Normally this isn’t such a problem, however, to continue with our example, let’s look at ktb — كتب.  It could be “kutub” (books), it could be “kataba” (he wrote), or it could be “kutiba” (it was written).  You have to figure it out from context, which is a bit of an advanced skill.

2. The lack of cognates with English. The running joke when learning Spanish is that you can add “o” to the end of an English word and make it a Spanish word.  It’s usually not true, but it’s based on the number of cognates between the two languages — words that are similar enough in form and meaning that speakers of one can understand the other.  In Arabic, however, you can’t add “al-” to the front of an English word and make it correct — it’s kind of a crutch that the non-fluent but advanced speakers can use when speaking to a bilingual crowd so as not to break stride — I’ve thrown English words in when I don’t know the Arabic ones — but it doesn’t work in casual conversation.  The only cognates you’re likely to find are ones that were English to begin with: al-internet.  al-kumbyootir.  ad-dimuqraasiya. at-tiknuluujiya.

3. The lack of a “be” verb.  Where the lack of the be verb gets tricky is in the way the language has compensated for it — while there is not a verb for “to be,” there IS what my first Arabic instructor went to very great pains to make sure that we all understood was definitely NOT a verb for “to not be.”  Similarly, there is a not-verb for “to have been.”  Never mind that both look, smell, sound, and function like verbs in every other way, except, of course, for the fact that they’re not verbs.  Dammit.

4. There are no irregular verbs in Arabic. There are 500 regular verbal patterns, 495 of which only apply to one verb each.

5. Broken plurals. Similarly, there are lots of patterns for pluralizing words … and many of them are really irregular.  Grad students like to sit around and make up broken plurals for English to amuse themselves, which is how we decided a few years ago that the plural of “Bi-otch” is “Bowatchaa’”

6. Diglossia.  This is probably the biggest challenge for the learner of Arabic as a foreign language.  “Arabic” — the language that is taught in a classroom, is often Modern Standard Arabic, a constructed high language based on the language of the Qur’an (but not necessarily mutually intelligible with it).  It is grammatically rigid, nuanced, and eloquent.  It is not, however, what people speak in their daily lives.  Countries, regions, cities all have their own dialects that are based on MSA, but have been influenced over the centuries by other factors.

The Egyptian dialect–the one I’m the most familiar with–contains both words of Turkish origin (from the four centuries of Ottoman rule) as well as words of Coptic origin (Coptic is the language of the Egyptian Christian church, and is descended from the ancient Egyptian language).  In fact, I have a book on my shelf that outlines the number of words in Egyptian Arabic that can be traced back to the days of the pharaohs.  The Moroccan dialect, by contrast, contains a lot of words that haven’t been used since the medieval period in other parts of the Arab world, as well as a lot of Berber and French.

When I first arrived in Egypt as an undergrad, I had two years of Modern Standard under my belt and found myself unable to communicate with another living soul.  Those who could speak Modern Standard usually tired of hearing me struggle and would switch to English, which they usually spoke better than I could speak Arabic.

New textbooks now introduce dialect early on — as well they should.  I couldn’t even agree with people — I’d been taught to use the formal na’am, while most people in the eastern Mediterranean actually say aywa.

A few thoughts to throw out there — Arabic is definitely a challenging language, but the things that most people get hung up on aren’t even an issue.  Get over the squiggly letters and the right-to-left, oh interviewers of the world!

And, for God’s sake, quite trying to figure out whose fault it is … yeesh.