Passion
I love learning Arabic and I hate reading the news.
There’s honestly too much to say about both topics for one blog post, so I’ll break this down into two sections. We can start with love so that if you don’t want to read the hate part you can just stop at the break.
Language learning is a lot like a video game. You start off with jumping over the beginning obstacles: pronunciation, introductions, and listening to new sounds. You never really play the level perfectly, but you pass it. You can always go back and practice, but unless you move on to the next level, it gets boring.
Next is the alphabet and sentences, pronouns and prepositions, some beginner nouns and verbs. Now you’ve got “enemies” (mistakes, not people!). Your enemies are conversations where you must decipher what a new word means by context clues and facial expressions. The stakes start to increase here, looking up a word could mean you bring a conversation to a halt, or asking what someone means might introduce even more vocab you can’t grasp yet.
It starts getting difficult when you must start connecting the whole puzzle. Prepositions, conjugations, sentence structures and tonal inflections start adding onto the words you’re still trying to get a hold of. You start to pick up on sarcasm, boredom, excitement, or apathy much easier as you begin to understand the cues in both people’s language and in their expressions.
You begin to understand what people value when they talk, if they want you to speak casually or properly, or if they’re expecting you to be honest with them or to tell them what they want to hear. The stakes rise again, and like the other levels, you never will get it 100% perfect.
Right now, there are still people trying to beat each other’s time on the very first level of Mario ever made, and grandmasters playing chess against robots that should theoretically never lose. Maybe there’s a robot or an obsessive student out there who speaks Arabic so elegantly people mistake the speech for the Quaran.
And so naturally, I haven’t “beaten” these previous levels the same way those brave fools still playing World 1-1 Mario have not beaten that level. I practice frequently, but what I am so excited about is I am beginning to understand how I can structure learning the next “level” of Arabic. It turns out that traditional Arabic grammar follows complex, though consistent patterns. Many words possess a three consonant root with an inherent meaning, as I mentioned in my first blog post (k-t-b generally involves writing or having to do with a book). However, by adding a “mim” (an m consonant) to the beginning of verbs will make them nouns. Looking around town, I see signs that start with a “mim”, and by reading the rest of the word I can sometimes decipher the root. Bookstore, for instance, has the “mim” at the beginning of the k-t-b book root along with a special “ta” letter that signals femininity at the end. By learning lots of new roots, I can start to build and discover new nouns too!
I am getting a sense of where the next level is sitting now. Long a’s and doubled consonants can also change the meaning of roots reflexively or associatively, creating even more ways that roots can be used. It’ll take some practice for sure, but it will be a good opportunity to practice previous “levels” as well. My listening skills could definitely use some work, and a firm grasp of the roots will undoubtedly be crucial. It’s an incredible and exciting practice that I am looking forward to continuing.
Forgive my honesty.
I used to really enjoy reading the news and really hated learning foreign languages. The news was entertaining and far removed from the struggles of my day-to-day life (at that time Chinese was giving me quite a bit of trouble), and it seemed like every time I scrolled through the news there was a vital story, killer product, or viral meme that was taking the airwaves by storm.
How ruthless the switch has been. Now I find new tools, stories, and ideas in languages: English and Arabic. The news has become the vessel for the same kind of frustration and absurdity that I once found in a small classroom and an even more confining textbook. It is humbling, and thankfully I am better now than I was ten years ago at feeling confused and upset, but still, daily headlines do cause my blood pressure to rise.
I suppose, in a way, this is good for me. I am being challenged here in ways that I was never challenged at home. My faith is under constant scrutiny, my actions are analyzed far more than they ever were in the States, and I feel constant internal pressure to work my hardest to justify my being here. These pressures feel even more intense than they did at the beginning of service because I can feel the real weight of the diplomatic element of Peace Corps service, known as Core Objective Two: to promote a better understanding about Americans to my Host Country.
What is particularly frustrating at the present moment is a strong feeling that I am providing far more value to what is essentially a caricature of the United States government than I am to my host community or myself. Providing more collective value for an employer than you would provide yourself individually is the nature of a job, but ideally, I am serving the interests of the American people that takes a small margin of that value instead of cutting a massive slice of good will so that it can be devoured by a gluttonous government and increasingly lecherous technocrats who will never pay it back. I fear that I, and other volunteers, have been running diplomatic cover when it is neither appreciated nor wanted. That is, what we would call in Morocco, Mashi Mzzyan.
It is, of course, my choice to continue to serve, the same way that it is my choice to post this blog article. Service is full of challenges that volunteers handle privately and publicly, and I would like to accurately represent the struggles that I am facing here, even if digital life is now about cleverly lying about what you are doing to extract maximum benefits from the people you are claiming to be representing while fooling the ones who are supposed to be watching over you. I suppose I’d do pretty well on a campaign team.
Still, no rest until I’ve got some better ideas. Sorry for the delay on this one, much to think about.
