Egypt

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Ambiguity: Four ways you can learn from not fully understanding Arabic

February 17, 2016 by 1 Comment
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Accept ambiguity

Accept Ambiguity.

15 Essential Skills of an Arabic Learner

Accept ambiguity in your conversations and interactions in Arabic. Being able to accept and be comfortable with situations in which you do not understand everything that is being said to you (or written) is essential to learning Arabic. Having the flexibility to be able to adapt to input that is slightly beyond your ability to fully grasp will stretch you and cause you to apply internal learning strategies that advance your language skills.

This article is based on the 15 Essential Skills of an Arabic Learner.

An unfortunate scenario of not understanding everything

 

“Thank you very much for your offer, but for this daughter of yours, a thousand pounds would never be enough!” Setting aside the thorny issues of arranged marriages, finances, and power relationships in families in a conservative society, this sentence probably signifies the high water mark of my Arabic language blunders. It shows how awkward it can be to not understand everything being communicated around you in Arabic.

I was visiting a village in southern Egypt. I was young and thought I knew a lot of Arabic. While being introduced to the extended family of my friend I was staying with, they told me with a smile that they wanted me to marry into the family so I could stay with them forever. Arranged marriages are common in village life. I knew enough to realize that they weren’t serious, but rather were just paying a compliment to me. That compliment being, if I would pay 1000 Egyptian Pounds, I could marry their daughter Fatma. She was sitting in the room with us at the time, looking as awkward as I felt.

 ممكن تدفع ألف جنيه

Mumkin tidfa3 alf guineeh…

(you can pay 1000 pounds…)

Unfortunately, rather than do the safe thing and just laugh and not really respond, I decided to be clever with my Arabic. Continue reading “Ambiguity: Four ways you can learn from not fully understanding Arabic”

Egypt - Egyptian Arabic - Learn Arabic - Learning process - Speaking

My Big Fat Arabic Wedding – Milestone 3

April 20, 2015 by 2 Comments
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Arabic wedding

The Arabic Wedding Vows – Matrimonial success, Arabic language fail!

(If you haven’t read Milestones 1 and 2 – “A cup of Tea” and “Signing the Contract”, this post will make more sense once you have read those). And the title of this post comes from the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002).

Learn Arabic through Arabic Weddings

There I was, standing at the front of an Egyptian church in Cairo, about to say my Arabic wedding vows in front of hundreds of people. My about-to-be wife was standing beside me looking gorgeous, rows of smiling faces stretched as far back in the seats as I could see, and I had my Arabic vows memorized. At least, I thought I did…. (you can probably see where this is going…)

——REWIND——

My first milestone was ordering a cup of tea in Arabic. The second big milestone was signing a rental contract. This is the third milestone – my wedding vows. In Arabic. I’m going to get vulnerable in this post and tell you all kinds of details about my personal life! Introduce you to my wife Heidi. And just in case you haven’t figured it out yet, that’s NOT me in the wedding picture above.  Keep reading.

Continue reading “My Big Fat Arabic Wedding – Milestone 3”

Egypt - Egyptian Arabic - Learn Arabic - Vocabulary

Shem El-Nessim شم النسيم

April 14, 2015 by 2 Comments
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Shem El-Nessim

Shem el-Nissim (شم النسيم) is an Egyptian holiday that celebrates the coming of spring each year.  We just got back from our annual Shem el-Nissim trip up to my wife’s family’s beach house on the Suez Canal.  Sunshine, water, an old rowboat, my awesome teenage kids, tons of food, and a generally fun spring atmosphere.  Here’s some Arabic words that came up a lot this weekend (Egyptian Arabic ones marked with a *): Continue reading “Shem El-Nessim شم النسيم”

Cairo - Egypt - Egyptian Arabic - Learn Arabic - Learning process - Speaking - Vocabulary

Learning Arabic – Milestone 2

March 18, 2015 by 1 Comment
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Milestone 2 - the rental contract

Signing the Contract

(If you haven’t read Milestone 1 – A Cup of Tea, this post will make more sense once you have read it).

My first year in Egypt was spent immersing myself in Arabic. I was determined to make the most of what I thought would be a single year here. My plan was to take in as much Arabic language learning as I could in as many ways as possible.

Five days per week, I was in class at the American University in Cairo.The program was intense – five hours a day of instruction.About 3/4 of the class time was spent studying Modern Standard Arabic (فصحى) and 1/4 of the time spent studying Egyptian Colloquial (عامية).The teachers were for the most part good, and some of them were excellent.One of my favorite teachers was Abbas Al-Tonsi, co-author of the famous Al-Kitaab books for Arabic language learning.He revolutionized my thinking about learning vocabulary, even though that was not the main focus of the course I took with him. More on vocabulary in a later post.

In addition to class time, we had 2-3 hours of Arabic homework per night, on average.On top of this, I decided I was going to spend as much time speaking Egyptian Arabic as possible.Learning Arabic was my priority. I was unconventional.I made friends with a fruit-seller on our street named Ibrahim, and sat on a chair next to him for 1-2 hours per day, at least 5 days a week.I would talk with him in Arabic (he spoke no English), as well as with all kinds of customers that came by.It was only after I had been doing this for several months that I learned from other people that in Egyptian society, this was seen as strange.I was not concerned with that!

Fruit Seller
Fruit Seller (credit: Fox News)

So all in all, I was spending something in the range of 8-10 hours/day learning Arabic.Eating, breathing, sleeping… lots of Arabic. Continue reading “Learning Arabic – Milestone 2”

Cairo - Egypt - Learn Arabic

Islamic Cairo – glimpses

March 12, 2015 by
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Andrew at Bab Zuwaila

Islamic Cairo is one of my favorite places in Egypt.  Thousands of students come here each year from around the world, and learning Arabic is one of the things they do.

This is a set of random street shots I took on Wednesday morning in Islamic Cairo.  Of course, I finished my morning off with a Turkish coffee at El-Fishawy coffee shop (not shown in this video). 🙂

Egypt - Egyptian Arabic - Learn Arabic - Learning process

Learning Arabic – Milestone 1

March 9, 2015 by 2 Comments
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Learning Arabic with Egyptian Tea

Learning Arabic in the everyday things

Learning Arabic has been a long journey for me.  As I share resources, tips, and insights on this blog to help people in their own journey to speak, understand, read, and write Arabic, I thought I would share some of my milestones that I passed.

If you are getting to know me, I arrived in Egypt in 1991, on a year abroad from the University of Toronto in Canada.  I was studying in a linguistics program (which later shifted into the Department of Near and Eastern Civilizations, since I overloaded my credits with Arabic courses!) and wanted to learn a “different” language.  My friends were taking years in places like France, Spain, or Germany.  I though through the places in the world that interested me, and decided to study in Egypt.  I’ve been here since.

Thinking back over how I started learning Arabic, I can think of a few milestones in my progress.

New in Egypt

On my first day in Egypt, I went from my apartment to the place I would study:  the American University in Cairo.  I was signed up for a year of learning Arabic in their Arabic Language Institute (now the Department of Arabic Language Instruction).  I walked through some crazy traffic, found my way to Tahrir Square, and eventually discovered the old campus of AUC.

Tahrir Square Continue reading “Learning Arabic – Milestone 1”

Egypt - Learn Arabic - Speaking

Learning Arabic can take time

February 7, 2015 by
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Learning Arabic at the Cairo Airport

Learning Arabic at 2:00 am

It’s 2:00 am and I am checking in at Cairo Airport Terminal 1.  Heading out of country for a short trip to the US and Canada.  Gearing myself up for some COLD weather in Canada!

Airports have a lot of verbal interaction, as you deal with porters, check in agents, drivers, security people, and other passengers.  Arabic definitely comes in handy.

Some people learning Arabic that I have come across here in Egypt seem to feel that the usefulness of Arabic is that it saves you from having to give tips, or lets you pay local prices.  Personally I don’t care as much about this one, although it is in fact helpful for living on a budget.  One trip’s worth of tips in a place like the airport can blow your whole monthly budget. But what I appreciate the most is the fun and sometimes humorous interactions it brings.  For me, humor is good.  And Egyptians love to joke and laugh.

Arabic conversation 1 – Porter

A porter lifts my carry-on bag onto the security belt.  I don’t actually need his help, and I don’t want to tip him because I’ve given out lots of tips already.  So instead I joke with him, and get him smiling.

Porter:  إنت بتكلم عربي كوايس.  بقالك كم سنة فى مصر؟

(You speak Arabic well.  How many years have you been in Egypt?”) Continue reading “Learning Arabic can take time”

Egypt - Learn Arabic - Learning process - Technology

Learn Arabic – then and now

January 31, 2015 by
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Learn Arabic like this

Wanting to learn Arabic, way back in the 80s and 90s

Learning Arabic is something I get a lot of questions about.  I started to learn Arabic in 1989.  That was when I took my first course in Modern Standard Arabic.  I have spent many years since then studying, learning, and using the language.  I have helped people who want to learn Arabic by creating and publishing Arabic language learning apps.

Learning Arabic in Toronto (where I grew up) back then was not very easy.  But it wasn’t really until I arrived in Cairo, Egypt, that I began to really move forward in being able to function in the language.  I had come to Egypt with one purpose – to learn Arabic.  It was August 27, 1991, and I was a brand new arrival in Cairo, on a year abroad at the American University in Cairo during my third year of a degree at the University of Toronto.

Why did I choose Arabic?  And why Egypt?  I chose Arabic because I was in a linguistics undergraduate program at the University of Toronto, and wanted to study a language other than the usual French, Spanish, and German that my fellow students were studying at the time.  I chose Egypt because it was the only place I knew of that would allow me to transfer credits back to my university in Canada.  Amazing how seemingly small decisions can change the rest of your life.  I’ve been here ever since.

Things that have changed in learning Arabic since 1991

Many things have changed since I arrived in Cairo that day almost 25 years ago.  Here’s some of the big ones: Continue reading “Learn Arabic – then and now”