Most expat's here who know arabic learned just from talking to people. I have a very hard time learning new words from hearing them. Also I have pretty limited interaction with Omanis because of the nature of my position, my shyness, and my boobs. So that won't work for me.
I can learn things pretty quickly when I see them. That's something I found out when I was trying to learn Spanish. So instead of learning to speak thank you's and hello's and how are you's, I decided to start with the alphabet.
There are 20 some basic letter shapes. Less than English even. Simple right? NO. There are also dots, one dot, two dots, three dots, dots above letters, dots below letters, circles, dashes, hatches, hicksas, maddas, sukuns, etc.. Then come the vowels. There are two different kinds and half the time they are not even written. Also everything is written in a cursive style. Because of that a letter may appear quite different depending if it is alone, beginning a word, in the middle of a word, or at the end of a word. Once I memorize my little letter flash cards, I still won't be able to pick out half the letters in a written arabic word. Then when I figure all that stuff out, and I can distinguish written sounds, many of the sounds are totally different than anything in english (or german or spanish). They may sound like phlegm or like gaging or like a mentally handicapped person speaking . The cherry on top, is that it is all written backwards...that is you start on the right and move left. Ahhhh!
Well I am making a little progress. So far I've memorized about 12 "letters". And I think I made a leap by recognizing that words are more readable if you think of them as a compilation of syllables rather than "letters". That's because the vowels are either not there, or they are an accent on the preceding cosonant...usually.
Wish me luck!
4 comments:
You can do it! Maybe you can just duct tape your boobs down, throw on a turban and draw on a mustache. They will never know the difference. Or just wait for another strike and start shouting what they shout :) Either way, I look forward to you speaking to me in some sort of arabic when I next see you. Make sure you aren't practicing at the airport though...very suspicious behavior. "But I swear Mr. Officer, I work for an oil company..."
Or throw a turban and draw a mustache on your boobs and tell them you're Siamese triplets from the Three Mile Island area....
Cool stuff. I love other languages, and how they blast to smithereens what we thought was the immutable grounds of our cognitive understanding. I love how you describe the subtlety of indicating vowels, and how a letter changes depending on it's placement, and how you perceive the fundamental block of understanding to be the syllable, not the letter. It reminds me of when I studied classical Chinese with the fundamental unit of the ideogram, a thing that had correlation with something of substance, a thing or idea, as opposed to the Western letter which is funadamentally just a construct. But following the analogy, that deconstructionist basis of Western language is somewhat "sub-atomic", as opposed to the "macroscopic" correlation of the ideograms. Hmmmm, maybe completely confused and totally off-base, but it's what your post inspired in me.
What would you name your boobs?
Geez, hasn't the rest of world figured out that English (well, "American") is the only language worth bothering with?
Who cares what Omanis think anyway? Just so long as they let us take their oil till it's gone :)
Saw your link on Kiva and followed you here. Not many women in your line of work, especially working in the ME. Good for you.
cheers
Just to let you know. Our company works for Petrolium Development OMAN, a company controlled by the Omani government. I'd go so far to say that we are their bitches. We are not exploiting them. They have a choice to hire us or not. Also, I'm happy to say that our entire junior staff and much of our senior staff is Omani despite the fact that we are an American/European based company.
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