Learning Arabic is hard as...something that's really fucking hard

[Docwagon 856]

I started learning Arabic when I was, unsurprisingly, in the Middle East for 2 years.  I got to the point I could do simple things like order in a restaurant, make inane small talk, etc and could read very simple children's books.  9 years later and I can't even do the fucking alphabet any longer.

 

We're planning a visit to Jordan next year in conjunction with our Spain trip (a week in Barcelona then a week in Amman), and I really want to be able to speak half way decent Arabic.  My father in law speaks decent English, but my mother in law doesn't know anything but "hi, how are you, I'm fine."  It seems rude to go and not be able to talk to her at all or to force my wife to play translator the whole time.

 

So my wife is helping me pick it back up.  Some words I remember pretty well, some I can't for the fucking life of me make stick in my head.  Grammar is going to be fun.  Luckily, Jordanian dialect is a fairly simple one and they aren't really picky about various tenses and things that English speakers get wrapped around the axle about.  Its apparently one reason they talk with their hands so much.  Why say "this one" and "that one" when it can be the same word and you can point?  Hada saboon can mean "this soap" or "this is soap" or "that soap" and you'll figure it out from context or from gestures.  Easy enough.  The difficultly comes in with the sounds we don't have and vice versa.  I need to relearn the alphabet (which, by the way, is named for the first two letters in Arabic alif and baa) so that I can see the words, which helps in pronunciation.  Say "then" and then say "think".  Notice that the 'th' sounds slightly different in each word?  Of course you fucking didn't.  You will now that you think about it, though.  Well, those are separate letters in Arabic, and then they have an "emphatic" version of them, which we won't even get into.  Anyway, to transliterate them into English, they use th, TH, dh, and DH.  See the confusion?  Right.

 

So I've got about a year.  We'll see.  At least I can get a cup of tea if I want it, and then find the bathroom afterward.  Bidi Chai.  Wheyne hammam?

[Plumbers Crack 4,062]

Good move Doc and it keeps your brain active!

Or you can adopt the English approach that we use in most foreign tourist resorts:-

Speak s-l-o-w-l-y to them in English and keep repeating it louder and louder each time until they understand. I'm told it's very effective!!

[deterioration 443]

This is unamerican; never learn the native language and expect everyone to cater to you. O wait, you're not from the Estados Unidos Mexicanos

 

Good luck!

[Docwagon 856]

Good move Doc and it keeps your brain active!

Or you can adopt the English approach that we use in most foreign tourist resorts:-

Speak s-l-o-w-l-y to them in English and keep repeating it louder and louder each time until they understand. I'm told it's very effective!!

 

Everybody speaks English, and everyone takes Dollars.  

 

Here's another hard part.  My brain has two buckets for language.  "English" and "Not English".  Since I do speak enough Spanish to get through simple conversations and investigations, I have a fairly decent vocabulary in that language.  My brain never figured out that Arabic is a new language, it just keeps chucking it into the "Not English" bucket.  Even when I was overseas, if I didn't know the Arabic word really well than the Spanish word would sometimes pop out.  There's been a few times that I actually forgot which language a word was for.  

 

Then just to TOTALLY fuck things up, some words are almost the same in Spanish and Arabic, only with a slightly different pronunciation.

 

Go to Google translate and put in "shirt" in the English box.  Listen to the result in Spanish and Arabic?  It's like Kam'eese vs Ka-mee-sah.