Dialect and Other Challenges

Welcome to post #3! The theme of this week is: easing into life as a student and resident in Amman, not just as a tourist. After taking our written placement exams on Sunday, each of us had an Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) with one of the program’s teachers. These 15 minute conversations in Arabic serve two purposes: they serve as a supplement to the written placement exam, and they are also a benchmark for our conversational abilities in Arabic for comparison at the end of the program.

Interestingly, although not completely surprisingly, I was placed in the same class as all three of the other Carleton students in the program (we’ve all gone through the exact same classes, after all, so we’re all essentially at the same level).The program has an excellent student-to-faculty ratio, ours is a class of 7 with a teacher, a full-time teachers aid, and a part time master’s student helping us as well. The class is conducted solely in Arabic, no English allowed, for 4 hours every day. There’s a lot of class participation and skits in small groups to help improve our fluency in a variety of situations. It’s intense and very fast-paced, but it’s a great environment for pushing our Arabic abilities into more advanced territory. So far we’ve gone over how to ask questions in dialect, how to interact with taxi drivers, names of fruits and vegetables and how to ask for prices, and some common verbs to describe our daily routine. It’s been very useful and I’ve been trying my best to practice outside of class!

These first three days of classes has been a crash course in the local Jordanian dialect. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Arabic, it is not a globally homogenous language. Levantine Arabic differs quite a bit from Egyptian Arabic or Gulf Arabic, and truly a lot from North African Arabic, to the point where native Arabic speakers have trouble understanding each other if they are unfamiliar with the dialect. At most American universities they teach what is called فصحى (fusHa), or Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). MSA is based on the Arabic from the Qur’an, adapted with vocabulary for the modern world, and it is grammar-heavy and only used for official government purposes or perhaps for some higher education. Think Latin vs. Italian, if Latin was still somewhat used to communicate. After two years of study I can hold a decent conversation in MSA, but as soon as I encounter a local speaking dialect, or عامية (‘amiya), the majority of it goes straight over my head. It’s an issue of pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar combined and it’s truly a mess.

For example, one of the largest differences between FusHa and Jordanian Amiya is how they conjugate verbs. In Amiya, the first verb in a sentence, if it is in the present tense, starts with a b. They just slap it on before the first letter. I think I’ve pronounced the sound ‘b’ more times this week than all of last year. In addition, all of their question words and pronouns and prepositions are different from FusHa, so we had to relearn all of those as well. Most of class these past few days has been us speaking in Arabic, then our teachers correcting all of our words with the Amiya equivalent. It’s been a lot of work and I’m still getting the feel for the dialect, but that being said, it’s still the same language. FusHa is a great stepping stone to learn any Arabic dialect because you essentially just have to drop some of the rules and tweak your pronunciation and there you have it.

As a side note, my favorite greeting in Jordanian dialect is “shu fee ma fee”, to which the response is “Safiya wafiya”. Who doesn’t love a good rhyme? As a second side note, my new favorite verb is “bafrushee”. As in to “brush” your teeth. Or perhaps “bee butawin”. As in to go “between” two cars. There are very few cognates between English and Arabic, so it’s always exciting to find a borrowed word here and there.

I’m in a reflective mood tonight, so I thought I’d share some of my personal observations from the start of the program. After only a week it’s become increasingly clear that the best way to learn Arabic is to speak it all the time with as many native speakers as possible, which is what our teachers have been encouraging us to do. I’ve been finding this a challenge for several reasons. Firstly, I can be self-conscious about my Arabic abilities, and tend to shy away from conversations with those who are much more fluent than me. On top of that, I’m generally a fairly introverted, quiet person, especially when in large groups or in unknown environments. In a program whose goal is essentially to get us to talk as much as possible with lots of different people and strangers in a foreign country using a difficult, uncomfortable language, needless to say I’ve gotten overwhelmed a few times already. However I’m feeling optimistic and want to challenge myself to search out opportunities for socializing and to not care if I make language mistakes, since clearly I’m not a native speaker and honestly locals here are impressed that I know any conversational Arabic beyond just greetings and memorized phrases. And if ever do need a break for myself, I always have my room and my music waiting for me.

I’m reminded of other uncomfortable beginnings in my life: entering high school and college, my first research experience over the summer, any and all summer camps I attended, etc. New environments always make me nervous, sometimes to the point of nausea, and it can take a few days or a few weeks before I feel comfortable with my surroundings. However, it is always the people I make friends with that make the place feel like home, and I’m always glad of the experience afterwards. I know Amman will feel the same way by the end of the program, إن شاء الله (God willing, a very common Arabic expression placed after any statement about the future). Already, the apartment and surrounding are feeling like my turf. I’ve begun cooking for myself, practicing music, and going to the gym, all of which help me feel settled in. All learning experiences are uncomfortable, but that’s where growth occurs.

Enough feelings. Back to the travelogue. Today, my roommate Ellis, classmate Andres, and I took a taxi down to souq al jama’a, the street market that pops up every weekend. There is a veritable plethora of clothes and shoes and bags and electronics and silverware and toys and other miscellanea at bargain prices. You can find shirts for half a dinar (less than one USD) if you try. Andres bought a shirt for 5 JD, rather on the expensive side, but it was a Marmot brand shirt worth $120 dollars in the US, with the tag still on. You also find tons of random clothes form sports teams, high schools and colleges in the US. We even saw someone’s family vacation shirt from a trip all across Minnesota. I’m definitely headed back!

After the souq, we walked to Wasat al Balad (“center of the country”), with an even greater selection of streetside vendors. We ate a delicious light lunch at the Hashem restaurant, an iconic place for falafel, hummus, and baba ghanoush and did some more browsing before calling it a day and heading back to the apartment.

Today was a lot of fun which means that tomorrow is work/study day! I have lots of new vocabulary to review, and the apartment could use some cleaning before our Jordanian roommate arrives on Sunday. Can’t wait to see what next week has in store for me!