Slowly but Surely

Progress in Arabic

I’ve decided to title this post “slowly but surely” because I think it pretty accurately describes how my Arabic is coming along. Last weekend I went on a hike with some of the Fulbright researchers who are currently taking 3 months of intensive Arabic before they being their research. It was interesting to listen to their impressions of how their Arabic is coming along as it helped me process how I feel about my own progress. Essentially they all agreed that on a daily basis they don’t think they’ve improved much in Arabic but when they consider their collective time enrolled in Qasid (the school where we all attend classes) it becomes apparent how much they really have learned. This is how I feel as well. My sentiments regarding my Arabic and general life in Amman can be very polarized. During some moments I almost want to cry (and have a few times) out of frustration but in other moments I feel such an incredible high. What keeps me going is that there is a balance and that I just have to power through the bad times.

Classes at Qasid started about three weeks ago. I attend a class on the local dialect on Sundays and Tuesdays from 4:30pm until 6:50pm. Our teacher is named Hadeel and she’s a lot of fun. Our class consists of some post baccalaureate students from Britain and the USA as well as a few study abroad students from Britain. There are four other Fulbrighters in my class. Each chapter at Qasid has a theme. The chapter we just did had food related vocabulary. We are learning how to conjugate verbs in Amiya (the dialect) as they’re slightly different from Modern Standard Arabic which most of us learned at our home universities. Sometimes the differences are slight and other times they are quite significant. The verb conjugations are pretty similar thankfully. For example, “I study” in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is “adrus” but in Amiya it’s “badrus.” There are also differences in pronunciation. The q in Amiya is pronounced differently from MSA and also differently between women and men. For women it’s a glottal stop like the sounds you get between “uh” and “oh” when you say “uh oh.” For men it’s a g sound. What’s tricky is that sometimes the q still sounds like that of MSA so I have to figure out when it changes and when it remains the same. More often than not I feel absolutely overwhelmed by how much there is to learn. By far the most frustrating part is learning new vocabulary. I have the absolute hardest time remembering the words I study. I can’t rely on the crutch that is Latin like I did for French, Spanish, and Portuguese. My timeline for learning new works is very long. I’m presented with vocabulary from the chapter at Qasid. I go over them. I then make flash cards. Then I study the flash cards multiple times. Afterwards I quiz myself on the original page from the Qasid text. A few days later I’ll go over them again and maybe know one third of them! What’s most depressing is that is just while I’m in the comfort of my own home reviewing vocabulary at my own pace. I’ll have a real life interaction and of course the word won’t come to me at that instant. Last night for example, I had taekwondo practice and spent a while chatting with my coach and one of the middle school-aged girls after practice. There were plenty of things I wanted to say but couldn’t and I’m now getting used to having the moment, 15 minutes later, when the word occurs to me. It’s funny because upon a few occasions I’ve realized what I needed to say while entering my house after walking home from taekwondo. Slowly but surely (inch’Allah) things will become more automatic. I think what’s hard this time around is that I know what the journey to fluency involves and knowing how long it takes is very daunting. I almost wish this were my first foreign language and that I could be ignorant to the magnitude of time required to become skilled in it. Alas, I had to choose the hardest for last (?) and I just have to keep plugging away.

Weekend Hiking

            Since winter is upon us (more so indoors than outdoors due to the concrete and tile buildings throughout this region) I’ve been trying to take advantage of as many hikes as possible. Two weekends ago I rented a car with four Fulbrighters to hike Wadi (canyon) Himara and last weekend I hiked Wadi Zarqa Ma’in with an adventure tour group named Tropical Desert. Wadi Himara, which was supposed to lead us to a magnificent waterfall, ended up being dry. We still had an enjoyable time though. At one point we had an impromptu climb out of the small canyon to avoid a dog we heard barking ahead of us. Although we couldn’t see it because it was behind a few palm trees, we decided to climb around it just in case it decided to attack us. While hiking back out of the canyon a young Bedouin boy followed us on his donkey, approaching closer and closer until eventually he passed us up. The dog was not far behind him and I think we were all relieved to finally get a glimpse of the dog since it had caused quite a change in our hiking trajectory.  

            Last weekend I went on a rappelling trip through Tropical Desert Trips. We descended three pitches including two large waterfalls. It was exhilarating to hook up to the ropes and begin the descent without really seeing what you’re getting into. The two waterfalls were absolutely breathtaking both literally and figuratively since it was quite cold to be wet in that canyon. As always, hiking with a tour group is fun (the guides are all really cool and knowledgeable) but also requires a lot of patience since the groups are generally pretty large. It took us forever to do a relatively short hike since we each he had to be connected to the belay three separate times. Sadly I missed most of the game between Barcelona and Real Madrid that night but still had a fun time at the hotel sports bar that night. At the hotel I met up with a few Fulbright fiends and also a couple of local friends who are fans of Barça. After the game had ended, while I was sitting with two Jordanians (they were attempting a recap of the game in a mix of Arabic and English), a friend of those two Jordanians comes up and I am introduced to him. Apparently he’s the finance director of the hotel (Le Royal) and was very upset that I already paid my bill. In an attempt to make up for it (he even tried to cancel the Master Card charge – after I told him it wasn’t a problem at all) he invited us all to have drinks in the lounge at the top of the hotel. I learned a lot about the hotel and had an enjoyable time relaxing with such a beautiful view (it’s one of the tallest buildings in Amman). 

 

                                                     

            (the photos of me (red t-shirt) are by Izzy Hendry and Andrew Fichter)