Learning Arabic: Exam time

Dubai: I hadn’t felt this nervous since pulling my car onto Shaikh Zayed Road for the first time.

This week saw my intensive four-week Arabic course come to an end — which means final exam time. This would tell me how much I had learned (or had not learned) from 20 daily lessons.

I spent my evenings in the build-up to the exam pacing around my room, my Arabic textbook mocking me as it lay unopened on my bed. The revision I was avoiding would only confirm what I already knew – I was going to fail.

I need not have worried. The exam consisted of 90 questions; I answered 89 of them correctly.

Now I have finished patting myself on the back, I have to be honest; the exam was pretty easy. Questions included picking the correct response to a spoken phrase, correctly highlighting the opposite of a word, and choosing whether a sentence needs a masculine or feminine noun.

I say ‘pretty easy’ because — lest we forget — I am the one who questioned the femininity of very female (and very glamorous) tutor on several occasions. Unintentionally, I should add. It’s as simple as using the occasional masculine ‘ak’ suffix instead of the feminine ‘ik’.

This is the exam question I got wrong:

Choose the sentence that comes closest in meaning to: ‘Il-qitaar kbiir fil-mahatta.

a. ‘Il-qitaar ‘illi fil-mahatta kbiir.

b. ‘Il-qitaar fil-mahatta.

c. Na9am, ‘il qitaar fil-mahatta.

The sentence at the top means ‘The big train is in the station’. I circled b. The correct answer is a. My mistake: ‘illi’ means ‘which’ — so the answer is ‘The train, which is in the station, is big’ (though, in my defence, a subordinate clause should have commas on either side …).

But to answer the question that gave birth to the adventure in the first place — can a British expat pick up Arabic in a month? That is not so simple.

Can I speak Arabic? I would have to say no. Can I understand Arabic? Yes, some of it. Can I hold a conversation in Arabic? That depends entirely on the subject. The most important question is this: how useful is what I have learned? And the truth is: not very … yet.

Four weeks of lessons sounded like a lifetime’s worth on the morning of day one. Surely by the end, I would be chatting away in the city’s Arabic cafés as if I had spoken the lingo since birth.

Not quite. I sat in that classroom for exactly a day and a half. 36 hours. 2,160 minutes. Just 129,600 seconds. The time zoomed by.

Yes, I can manage a conversation in Arabic. It is invariably a long, drawn-out affair filled with pauses and tuts that can leave the other half of the conversation bored to distraction.

But my journey is far from over.

If I continue to practise everything I have been taught, and am not afraid of looking like an idiot and getting it wrong in front of actual human beings, I will come out the other side with a very worthwhile skill.

It will be even more useful if I take level two of the course sooner rather than later (I am still negotiating start and lesson times for this).

I know a hundred people in Dubai who once took a beginner’s Arabic language course (or more often, half a beginner’s course) and then let it fade from their memory like secondary school trigonometry. Practice is the key.

So if you see me sitting in one of Dubai’s Arabic cafés, looking around for someone to chat with, come over and say Marhaba. I’ll do my best to have a conversation with you.

Exams or no exams, that’s the real test.

Phrases of the week

Bayni w baynak/baynik … – Between you and me …

Ana aasiff – I am sorry

Tasharrafna biik(i) – Nice to meet you