Arabic evenings

Last night, K and I had our first Arabic lesson with cool colleague, Madame L, who is also a French teacher at school and used to teach at a boarding school right outside of Boston. That's right. She's fluent in Arabic, French and English, though her first language is Arabic. Being fabulously trilingual is not that uncommon, I hear, when one is Moroccan (as she is), but it's still totally impressive. And even though Moroccan Arabic is significantly different than modern standard Arabic (which is, again, different than Gulf Arabic), Madame L is teaching us the standard version.

So now we know half the alphabet and how to say hello/how are you/what is your name/my name is and good-bye. More or less.

Arabic is a beautiful written language, and sounds cool, too. It's not as gutteral as I initially thought. There are, however, three H sounds that are fundamental to learn and difficult for the native English speaker (me) or native Polish speaker (K) to master.

H #1 sounds just like the English H in "hello." Yea! A phonetic cognate!

H #2 is the sound you make when you blow onto a window it fog it up.

H #3 is gutteral. It has a lot in common with the H in Polish. It also has a lot in common with the sound of clearing your throat. It's actually easier than the fogging-up-the-window H because it's strong and obvious. H #2, when done incorrectly (ie: most of the time) just sounds breathy, like Marilyn Monroe singing happy birthday with every word.

In addition to the three Hs, there are various "th" sounds. And two "sa" and "da" that are exactly the same (as far as I can tell), except you say one more forcefully than the other. K compared the forceful versions to the sound accompanying a vigorous karate chop.

I've been told Arabic is a highly associative, poetic language. Arabic lessons are much the same. Last night was an exercise in mastering new sounds, then coming up with a host of metaphors and creative phonetic spellings to help us remember what we were learning (karate chops, fog on glass, etc.). We are also practicing how to write our letters, right to left as good Arabic students, and many, many times, like 1st graders learning the alphabet. My goal right now is to move from drawing my name (which is somewhat complex. K's is much easier) to writing it with confidence.

Our next lesson is in a week! I can't wait to learn the other half of the alphabet...