Learning language with you

“You speak Arabic in an American accent.”

Thus spoke my Lebanese-born cousin when I made the fatal mistake of saying the word for chicken in fus-ha, or formal Arabic, rather than in the Levantine dialect. Though this happened six years ago, my cousin’s remark has been seared into my memory ever since, partly because of the embarrassment it imparted and partly because of the insight it held. Until then, I, who had always been quick to notice and poke fun at the Arabic accent in my father’s English, had never realized that I fell into the reverse category, or that it was possible to speak Arabic in an American accent in the first place. 

It was my first glimpse into something I had not known I had been deprived of as an unwilling student of weekly, formal Arabic classes: the colorful world of spoken Arabic. My ears became more attuned to the rich variety of dialects that exist across the Middle East and North Africa. I began to listen with heightened attention to the informal vocabulary and distinctly Lebanese drawl in my parents’ speech. The knowledge that I could not hope to blend in with native speakers of Arabic, which had never bothered me before, suddenly weighed heavily on my heart and clumsy tongue. 

The LSA foreign language requirement

I wasn’t too worried when I first heard about the infamous LSA two-year language requirement as an incoming freshman. After all, my Arabic classes had taught me the (not so) basics of verbal conjugations, and my parents had always spoken to me mostly in Arabic (never mind the fact that I invariably responded in English). Testing out of a semester or two basically seemed guaranteed.

At least, until I actually opened the placement exam. 

I blinked in utter stupefaction at the walls of Arabic text in front of me. Unable to even parse what the questions were asking, I guessed on almost every single one. In the speaking section, after my dozenth “I don’t know,” all I could say in my defeat was “I’m sorry.” Finally, after the essay section, in which I pulled out words as if I were pulling teeth to form a grand total of one sentence, the proctor asked, with a glance at my nearly blank paper, “Did you forget to submit a page?” 

“No, that’s all I wrote,” I replied.

I was placed into Arabic 101.

Constructive criticism

The patient came into the clinic shouting and swearing in Arabic, demanding to see the doctor. His grandson stood unfazed at his side.

“Ammu, the doctor can’t see you for your refills until we take your vitals, so please take a seat,” the secretary implored. She waved me over before leaving the room. I opened his chart and steeled myself to ask him our standard questions in Arabic; after completing Arabic 101 and 102, it was time to put my newfound knowledge to the test. The octogenarian’s eyes narrowed on me in suspicion as I stumbled through the greetings.

“Do you smoke?” I asked in what I thought was smoothly confident Arabic, and mentally patted myself on the back for subtly throwing in the Levantine “b-” prefix on the verb. 

Seemingly in no mood to answer my questions, he shot back, “Were you born in America?” 

“Yes.”

“I can tell. Your Arabic is very broken,” he said gruffly. Before my eyes, a vision flashed of my two A’s in Arabic peeling off my transcript and bursting into flames.

“He said you’re bad at Arabic,” the grandson helpfully translated.

“Yeah, I got that. Thanks.”

With time comes change

On a chilly day in November of my sophomore year, a friend of mine from high school came to Ann Arbor and asked if she could stay the night at my apartment. We spent the evening wandering around the campus and catching up on each other’s lives. When the day drew to a close, we retired to my cramped bedroom, settled into our beds, and continued chatting, our eyes trained on the dark ceiling, until a hush fell over us. Piercing the silence, she said, “Do you think you’ve changed since high school?” 

A simple question, really. I quickly opened my mouth to answer before realizing that my mind had drawn a blank. I thought of the same old hobbies, insecurities and tendencies that had followed me into the present. I had entered university an inveterate worrywart, unknowing of what I wanted to do in the future, and terrified I would never find it. Had I changed? 

“In high school, I never really felt passionate enough about anything to want to study it. Now at least I know I want to minor in Arabic. I genuinely enjoy learning it now and I want to continue until I’m fluent.”

It was the only answer I could give in full honesty, though I hadn’t really known it until I spoke it aloud. I was tempted to say I had finally overcome all my fears and insecurities, became the person I had always wanted to be and figured it all out, but of course, none of that would have been true. Funnily enough though, I found that I wasn’t at all disappointed with that reality. 

The reality was that my perpetual indecision regarding my major had been joined by an inexplicably firm decision to minor in Arabic Studies the moment my Arabic 102 professor had announced its creation. The poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, with its English translation reflected by the original Arabic on each opposing page, now sat creased atop my forever-favorite novels. My long-held aversion to humiliating myself by revealing my clumsy wielding of the Arabic language had manifested as a persistence to speak it at any given chance so as to improve. I was the same person I had always been; I was also a through and through student of Arabic, eager to steep myself in the culture I had always side-stepped in fear and alienation. This was the change that had overtaken me before I even knew it.

The lists

Several years ago — as a middle school student — I decided, for no particular reason, to begin compiling every English word I stumbled across that I did not understand into a note on my phone. I began humbly with “emancipation” and made my way through the years to increasingly recondite words such as “recondite.” However, as time passed I found less occasion to lengthen my nearly one thousand-word long list, and it became stagnant, relegated to the depths of my Notes app. 

I was unexpectedly reminded of this relic of my past one day at the end of my sophomore year when I was filing my employment papers. The young white woman behind the counter looked at my home address and excitedly asked, “You’re from Dearborn?” When I answered in the affirmative, she asked if I spoke Arabic — a line of inquiry that intrigued me when I thought back on all of the elderly Middle Easterners who had only to perceive the hijab on my head before jumping into Arabic conversation, only to be sorely disappointed when I could merely smile blankly at them in response.

I told her, “I’m getting there,” to which she smiled and said that she’s always glad to have the opportunity to engage with Arabic speakers since she’s been trying to learn Arabic, the native language of her Jordanian partner. She spoke a few basic phrases in Arabic to me; I reciprocated and gave her pronunciation tips in line with the Levantine dialect. Finally, she pulled out her phone and proudly opened a note filled with dozens, maybe hundreds, of Arabic words transliterated into English with the corresponding translations, explaining that she was using it to keep track of every new word she learned, from isim for name to qalb for heart.

When I returned to my apartment, I opened my own forgotten list of words and studied it somewhat wistfully. It had been with me through the years, through all of the books I’d struggled to complete and all of the articles I’d labored to pick apart, a testament to the time and painstaking effort requisite to mastering a language, even a language that one is native to. I created a new note and began with a word I had just learned that morning before it could escape me: mujaddadan, or, “again.”

MiC Columnist Leila Kassem can be reached at lkassem@umich.edu.

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