Language Acquisition: Some Days I Feel Like a Nut, Some Days I Don’t

Several years ago, I participated in a trip with my church to Madrid, Spain. The brief immersion into the Spanish language was one of the first stimulants of my desire to know a foreign language. There was young man in his twenties from California who assisted our group throughout or stay. His command of the Spanish language was outstanding! Native speakers commented on his perfect accent and the flawless fluency with which he spoke. True he had studied Spanish in grade school and had been living and working in Spain for five years, but I regarded this as a moot consideration. At the time, I felt indubitably clever for being able to bargain with the gypsies and find the location of bathrooms quicker than my co-travelers. Little did I know how truly difficult it is to fully acquire a second language.

Arabic…How enrapturing it would be if I could wake up one morning and, as Nike so simply promulgates, just speak it. To hold this lofty expectation is not only an unreasonably fanciful dream, similar to my dream of looking like Keira Knightly when I wake up in the morning, but it is also simply impossible. This language is a complex system of words and phrases combined in such a way as to emphasize certain ideas and words and convey specific emotions and requests. For example, a method of adding prefixes and suffixes is employed rather than attaching pronouns and direct pronouns to a verb, thus lengthening the verb and causing that one word to encompass the subject and the direct object. Try speaking that in a split second. Even harder, try listening to that in a split second.

I envy those who learned multiple languages as they were growing up. A child learns more in the first eight years of his life than he learns throughout his remaining years on the earth. As a teacher in Jerusalem, I had a student who knew four languages at the age of eight. Though he was still learning and didn’t use all four of them equally as much, it still amazed me how his mind could process all four languages: English, Arabic, Hebrew and Swedish. I do not recall learning English as being a tortuous experience, but as I sit back and think about it, how my mind commands the language at present without having to continually process it is a staggering feat. How did this happen? How did my mind acquire such a skill without me really knowing and recognizing it? The final end of language acquisition (which I do believe is a never ending process) is to actively produce the language without thought: without having to sit back and form the words and phrases. “Just do it,” I am told. “Teba3n (Of course) it will come if you just listen, repeat, and speak.”

As an adult, to try and learn another language, which is leagues different from your native tongue, is like having an eternal root canal. Because spoken Arabic is a bit different from the written language, it is like having a root canal on both sides of your mouth…without an anesthetic. Of course the degree of torture is relative to the degree to which one wants to learn. I want to learn it…very badly.

Every day I get out of my bed, I am humbled by how little I know and pressed even harder to study. Though I don’t remember being two years old, I feel like I am two years old again. I long to communicate, but I can’t. I have ideas I want to convey, but I just don’t know how. I stand and stare having little to no idea what the people around me are saying relying mostly on the looks in their faces, tones of their voices, and gestures of their hands. I stammer and embarrass myself on a daily basis as I test the patience of my friends and teachers while trying to speak in Arabic. As I look back at all of the unbelievably embarrassing moments I’ve had through my life, I realize how truly great it is that I am able to make an absolute fool of myself with little to no care. Daily I make a fool of myself. Daily. Anxiously I look for new words, and with a child-like excitement, I conjugate them and attempt putting them to use. If I don’t use them repeatedly, I entirely forget them. With exuberance I rejoice when I understand what a person is saying, even though I only understand maybe 10% of what was said and usually that 10% can be translated “yes,” “no,” “left,” “right,” “Praise God.”

*I must take a step back and convey to you some of the initial frustrations and hilarities in learning Arabic. Have you seen the movie The God’s Must be Crazy? I won’t take the time to discuss the plot, which is relatively doltish but amusing at three o’clock in the morning, but I want to address their language. The characters use not only English but also Afrikaans and Ungwatsi. While watching the movie, all one really hears are the cool clicks and unfamiliar inflections in the sounds of their voices. These clicks and inflections are actually words. Can you hear it? Probably not. Now back to the Arabic…When, as a person who doesn’t speak Arabic, you listen to the language, you can’t automatically distinguish the sounds nor hear when one word ends and another begins. The initial phase of acquiring a language is adjusting your ear to that language. Unfortunately, I have a self-imposed aversion to watching television (which supposedly is a wonderful way to learn a language), so I practice listening by hovering around Arabic speakers with my eyes wide open, yet focusing on nothing, and a more attentive ear than that of a professional eavesdropper. It works well. Don’t try it unless you have developed an instinctive technique of acting as though you were not paying attention when the people turn around and stare at you with accusative look.

Despite the frustrations, I can already see a change, and it is the little satisfactions that provide the incentive to continue on. I don’t think I’d put my transformation on the same level as baptism or genuine repentance, but shwya, shwya (little by little). I hear from the taxi drivers, “Bitikelm 3raby kuwyis.” (“You speak Arabic well.”) I find myself speaking mixed Arabic and English, even though it may simply be a word here and there (this my father in the states finds entirely annoying). Additionally, I find myself forgetting to use capital letters in English and having to spend a significant amount of time producing some English words, even basic ones. I repeat verb conjugations and phrases while I’m walking the streets and riding the metro. I can only image how this sounds to the people riding next to me. I wouldn’t blame them for assuming I had aphasia or dementia, but I definitely find the sounds and words coming a bit easier. “Just do it,” I am told. “Teba3n (Of course) it will come if you just listen, repeat, and speak.”

I have been considering going all the way and learning the language to the point where I can teach it. After speaking to several linguists and professors of the language, the only thing I could see were the dollar signs flying by my head in light of the amount of schooling it would require, but Insha’Allah (God willing) we will see. In my language heaven, I dream of learning everything I can about Arabic, including the vocabulary, and then just waking up one day speaking, reading, writing, and using it fluently. This is language heaven: a surreal, euphoric existence which cannot be attained, even after the confession of linguistic sin and the acceptance of proper conjugation and morphology. I can visual my goal, but only time, practice, and usage will get me there. I do believe that I can learn this language, and I want to…very passionately. If only to communicate with the young boys I see sleeping on the metro, I want to learn this language. Some days I get it; some days I don't, but it will come if I just do it.