Some notes on Arabic

My ability to comunicate with non-English speakers here is miniscule, but vastly improved from when I first arrived. Hardly anything I learned in class back home helps, as far as vocabulary goes. I can recognize the letters of the alphabet, which is good, and I've probably got better instincts about grammar. I'm in a colloquial class here and I love it. It's so helpful, and I'm functional in very simple economic transactions like buying a toothbrush or changing money. But I love it--I love learning Arabic, and I know I'm getting better.

I was a little set back this morning about my Arabic. I finally found someone selling American coffee at a kiosk on campus, and I was so excited. It's instant coffee, but it's not as bad as instant coffee in the US, and it's cheap. If you walk into a cafe, you can't just ask for a coffee here, because coffee is much more complex. I have not yet ventured into the vast, spicy land of espresso. When I order "'ahwa americkia," I still have to wait the same amount of time as if they were making me espresso, because "'ahwa americkia" here is a single shot of espresso...plus enough hot water to fill up the rest of the cup. It actually tastes pretty similar, I'm sorry to say. BUT, so, I found this lady on campus with her Nescafe instant coffee, and I tried to ask her if this coffee was available all day long, everyday. I thought that I had constructed a decent sentence, but when I opened my mouth to say it, this horrible, nearly unintelligible accent came out. It was so Englishy that it was not Arabic, and she had no idea what I was saying. Luckily, she managed to communicate that the coffee will always be there for me. And I'm chalking my inability to speak up to the fact that it was early in the morning, and the coffee I was clutching possessively had not yet taken effect.

One of the biggest things that throws me off here is the Egyptian "word" for "yeah." As in English, where "yeah" sounds like a derivative of "yes," the Egyptian transformation from yes to yeah is ايوة (which sounds like Iowa, or more precisely "eye-wa") to او (which sounds like "o"). The part where I get caught up is inflection, because the tone in which you say او is highly reminscent of the way you'd say, "Oh," in an English speaking country when you're surprised. Except there's a very specific, consistent way that people say او here, which is specifically, consistently reminiscent of the way that a native English speaker would say, "Oh," immediately after they've been told, for the first time, some detail that is small but vaguely disappointing. Like if you found out that you had to change your traveller's cheques tomorrow instead of today, but you knew you had enough cash to get through today, then you might respond, "Oh, well then, I guess I'll do it tomorrow." I know this seems small, but this sound has a very clear and singular meaning in the US, and I never realized how such a small detail could make such a difference. But I was completely thrown off when I first heard او in my Arabic class--I would ask the professor a question to double-check some detail, and she would say, "Oh," in such a way, with that slightly descending tone, that I thought she was compassionately surprised by how inaccurate my understanding of the deatil was. But then she would begin to move on with the lesson--I was preparing for her to correct me, and she thought she had just affirmed that I had it right! I think it's for this reason that most of the American students here stick with ايوة.

Successes in Arabic so far include talking a little bit to one of female guards at the dorm, who's younger than me and very sweet and understanding of my inability to speak, and she has enough English to understand me when I have to give up on expressing myself in Arabic. Also, last night in the cab back from school, I managed to talk to our driver a little bit, with a great deal of help from Enas, my roommate. I conveyed on my own to him that I thought Egyptians are great drivers. I didn't try to explain that I think that because I know that Americans driving here would get in so many crashes--people ignore the painted lines on the road because you can fit more cars in a given space that way, and there aren't really traffic lights. I'm much calmer when an Egyptian driver is 3/4 inch away from another driver (no exaggeration) than when I'm in a car with an American driver a foot away from another car. They do it all the time here, and they crash about as often as we do.

People here speak so clearly--even if I don't know any of the words they're saying as they pass me on the street, I can tell exactly where each word stops and the next begins. This is very different from my experiences of native speakers of Spanish, even in Costa Rica where people spoke so slowly and clearly compared to how I hear native speakers of Mexican Spanish in Chicago.

The Egyptian students here are almost universally masters of the English language, including slang and how to curse and other complicated, esoteric uses of my native tongue. However, when they speak to each other, it's in Arabic with only an occassion sprinkling of English. This is good for me learning more Arabic, but socially I'm not quite sure of how to deal with the language barrier. If I'm in a group of only Arabic speakers, I'll sometimes look away from whoever's speaking so as to not make them feel self-conscious about using Arabic which obviously excludes me. I manage to get some of the jokes anyway, but all my meaningful conversations here have so far been with American students. Well, I take that back. My roommate is awesome, and we talk about below-the-surface stuff sometimes. In English, obviously.