In the beginning, I was assigned 5 classes, 3 in the intermediate level of fusha (pronounced "fus-ha," that's the Modern Standard Arabic used in the News and in official verbal and written communications of the Arab World), and 2 in beginning Egyptian ammeya (i.e. the Colloquial, or spoken dialect of Arabic). In addition to those, I signed up for an elective course on Quranic or Classical Arabic. All have been helpful and interesting in their own ways.
Eating couscousi in Khan al-Khalili with part of my Ammeya class
Two of my fusha classes, one writing and one grammar, are taught by the same teacher, Azza. Azza is a big, dour-seeming woman who wears an assiduously-pinned head scarf every day and black rimmed glasses perched forever on the tip of her nose except when she is walking. At first, she seems forever like she is barely tolerating your presence, and has a propensity for long disappointed sighs. If all my teachers weren't so great, she would definitely be my favorite. Her intensity and high expectations really kept us on our game most of the semester, pushing us to always be ready for class, always fearing one of her pained sighs followed by a slightly defeated sounding "bous ya shabab..." (sort of equivalent to "ok now look here, kids...").
But her terse manner was only the tip of the iceburg with Azza. We got the first hints of her really quite warm and expansive sense of humor in our writing classes when, upon coming to one of our mistakes, she would sing/say that stereotypical American "you messed up" motif from TV that goes "bumbumbum baaaaaa." (You'll figure it out.) This would happen every Tuesday as she had advised us at the beginning of the year that her preferred method of teaching in the writing class, which only meets twice a week, was to have us turn in a one-page writing assignment every week the day before our first class. She then marks up without correcting the mistakes on each paper, and then in class the next day, she puts them under a camera that connects to a projector screen on the wall. We then have to correct the mistakes together as a class. Though some might think this would be sort of mortifying to have all your errors dragged out and flayed in front of the class, I honestly was never bothered by this setup, and when everyone is making so many mistakes, it really doesn't matter. Azza, like a stern grandmother, is sparse and deliberate with her praise while generous with her constructive criticism, and because no one is spared, no one takes anything but the lesson to heart. Everyone learns from everyone else's mistakes, plus it forces us to actually go through and think about each mark on our paper, something most arabic students will tell you they would usually just ignore. What's more, Azza is really a loving wordsmith and grammarian--of French and English as well as Arabic--so she is great at explaining even the most nuanced, untranslatable aspects of Arabic. Perhaps that more than anything has been what I appreciated most, as I find more and more that a lot of Arabic is really not directly translatable.
My third fusha class is a 4-times weekly Arabic Media class. This class has been where I get most of my practice reading and listening to fusha while also learning lots of neat politically-charged vocabulary words like "sectarian conflict," "bilateral negotiations," and two different ways to say "car bomb." The class is a lot of repetition and memorization, but I enjoy--as much as one can--a lot of my homework from that class. Every news clip I listen to and every article I read is like a very satisfying puzzle to decode.
The teacher for the class, Leila (which, if you didn't already know, is the arabic word for "night"), is a chic, smartly-dressed woman in her late middle-age with a sort of impish sense of humor that peeks out every once in a while when we are not displaying over much incompetence. I remember once when she made fun of our apparent procrastination when she informed us that she would now be sending us our listening clips by email so we could download them and "enjoy the homeworks on the bus." It doesn't sound all that funny now that I'm writing it out, but at the time I thought it was pretty hilarious. I heared another story about Leila having a funny conversation about hash with one of her students in an ammeya class (Leila, as a good muslim woman, neither smokes nor drinks alcohol), but I don't really know the details. Everyday she walks in wearing a pastel-colored pants suit and speaks quietly with what I think could be a very loud voice when she wants it to be. Of all my teachers, it seems like she has perhaps the most boring job, as Media classes mostly consist of repeating vocab over and over, with us working on reading and listening assignments on our own, or her babying us (some of us more than others, and altogether less now than at the beginning of the semester) through news articles. Luckily, I know all the teachers rotate between the classes they teach, so one semester they might be teaching media, and one semester they might be teaching Quran. This also works out that all of them are roughly equally able to answer questions about really an0ything we ares studying, and they are more or less aware of what we are doing in all our other classes.
Discussing an Arabic movie my Ammeya class had just gone to see in the theaters
Besides having really good connections between the teachers, since it is the same group of students in all of my fusha classes, the six other students and I have developed that closeness that comes with spending 2-5 hours a day with each other 5 days a week. Including me, there are 3 girls and 4 guys. All the girls are Junior or Senior undergraduates studying abroad, while all of us guys happen to be graduates studying Arabic for our various personal or professional reasons. Although, I have found myself to be kind of impatient with the other students' pace of learning (I often find myself saying things to myself, quite ungenerously, like "God why don't you know that "ightiyal" means assassination yet??"), I like everyone in the class very much, and am happy that for the most part we are equally serious about trying learn this language. Regrettably I haven't spent that much time with them outside of class, but when I have I've always had fun as they are all really interesting and come from very different backgrounds from a Muslim lesbian to a former platoon leader in Iraq. If I get frustrated with some of them in class for picking up things slower than me, I really only have myself to blame. With the exception of one other person, I've taken at least a full year or more of Arabic than everyone else, and I know if I had spent even 1/10 of the time I spent on my thesis on Arabic in college, I probably would have been prepared to place into higher intermediate fusha. So while I flatter myself to say that I may naturally have better pronunciation than most of the people in class, whatever other superiority I may have probably comes from my being exposed to more Arabic for longer.
[Side rant:] On the other hand, one of my classmates keeps mispronouncing the damn Arabic word for Egypt, and every time he does I want to punch him in the face. Not only is this ridiculous based on the soul fact that we live in the country and every single person says the name of it every single day, but the absurdity is compounded by the fact that there are actually TWO acceptable pronunciations of the word, "Masr" (like the "a" in "about") or "Misr" (like the "i" in "dim"), one that the rest of the Arab world and one that Egyptians use (don't ask me why). So why in god's name does he choose to pronounce it like "Moosr"??! This wouldn't be such a pet peeve of mine, except this particular student, while being a really nice guy and an enthusiastic Arabic learner, does this with all kinds of Arabic words, and it drives me a little nuts. (Tbis is an understatement; it turns out that I am incredibly impatient sometimes. This will not surprise many of you.)
Out to dinner with most of my fusha classmates. Azza didn't make it out to join us...
As for my ammeya classes, one is technically strictly just a conversation class while the other I guess is just supposed to be for teaching us the vocab and different grammar constructions of the Egyptian dialect, but in practice both classes are pretty much just conversation classes. The only difference is that the latter class meets more often and has us work on conversations as well as grammar and vocab. Now when I say Egyptian grammar, I'm sort of talking about a nonexistent thing. Or something that has so many variations and exceptions, that it may as well not have many rules. It happens that Egyptian ammeya is one of the most different dialects from the fusha all my studies had been in before this. I've often likened the difference--with only a bit of exaggeration--to the difference between Spanish and Italian or Portuguese, it seems so distinct at times. The most annoying way that this manifests is in that even the words that are almost spelled the same in both fusha and Egyptian are pronounced in rather drastically different ways. It kind of feels like your entire vocabulary is useless as so many Egyptians just stare confusedly at you. There are lots of other differences (including pronouncing about 7 of the letters totally differently (though not in consistent ways) from how they're pronounced in fusha), that I will restrain myself from boring you all with, but the other big challenge is the fluidity of their word order that is really different from fusha. The existence of all these possible variations in word order means I could say the exact same sentence that I hear an Egyptian say, and some other Egyptian very well may not understand as he assumes that, as a foreigner, I don't know what I'm saying and mean something else. Lose-lose.
All the difficulties of the Egyptian dialect notwithstanding, the teacher of my non-conversation class, a young grad student from Alexandria named Mariam, has somehow managed to get me fairly comfortable with some basic Egyptian ammeya. She doesn't look like she is a teacher as she is probably only about 5 years older than me, and because she everyday looks like a Banana Republic model, wearing high-heels that can be heard before they are seen to counteract her roughly 5-foot stature. She dresses more stylishly than most American girls I know (sorry Vassar girls), which, as we found out on a class field trip of sorts to the outdoor market of Khan el-Khalili, leads some Egyptians to mistake her for a foreigner. As we were walking down a street listening to her describe something we had just seen in Arabic, a shopkeep, in that characteristically forward and aggressive manner of Egyptian shopkeeps in Khan, butts in (in English) and shouts "Ah you speak Arabic!" at her in that voice that Egyptians use when they are surprised to meet a foreigner speaking Arabic. We all laughed at the annoyingness of the shopkeep and walked on to get some couscousi (sic) and tea at a cafe in the middle of the market, where she, ever patient, conversed with us for another two hours. She may look like she could be a foreigner who is still in college, but she is the picture of a modern Egyptian woman, and an astoundingly good teacher.
Ammeya classmates drinking some Tea and practicing Arabic
with our teacher
at the most famous Cafe in Khan el-Khalili
Ammeya is the only class I've had off campus, but that is not what also makes Mariam standout from my other teachers. Like all the rest of my teachers, Mariam puts up with lots of halting sentences and horrific mispronunciations, but more than any other teacher I've had in my life, Mariam relentlessly and patiently has us repeat words over and over until she is satisfied with our pronunciation. It seems a little infantilizing, but it is, in fact, incredibly helpful. If she were a literary character, the author might comment that the diligence with which she dresses causes her to make us repeat words endlessly until we meet those same demanding, nitpicky standards. She uses her unmistakable smoky, loud voice to guide our class through the subtleties of the Egyptian dialect with her perfectly enunciated pronunciation. There's no getting around the fact that learning a language is a lot of rote memorization, and our teacher recognizes that we need to force difficult words into our pronunciation comfort zone by repetition if we are ever to speak fluidly, never shirking from forcing us to stay on the conjugation of a difficult word until it is perfect. Because all the people in my class are students of Arabic with fusha but no ammeya background, words from our fusha inevitably creep their way into our ammeya speaking which our teacher always swiftly corrects in her loud, authoritative voice. At one point, after a student had used one too many improper fusha words in a sentence, she exclaimed half-jokingly "No! No fusha! Speak ammeya! I will RUIN your fusha!" I laughed, because everyone starting ammeya feels like the two versions of Arabic are just one big inseparable jumble in our heads. With the help of the conversation class, the teacher of which is my only unimpressive instructor, my ammeya has come along all right, and this is most definitely thanks to Mariam's teaching.
With another semester here, I think I actually would have made some really considerable progress with my Egyptian ammeya, but instead I'll be going back to step one with Syrian ammeya. Luckily, it's supposedly easier and closer to fusha. While fusha is understood and read, if not spoken, Quranic Arabic is probably even better understood throughout the Middle East, which is in part why I chose to take an elective on the Quran.
The Quran is in fact the original compendium of Arabic grammar and pronunciation, so the class has served to teach and/or reinforce all kinds of crazy Arabic nuances while also giving me all kinds of antiquated meanings for fusha words I thought I knew. The rarefied complexities of Islamic scripture aside, the class has been great as an avenue for practicing my fusha conversation skills. Our teacher is a tall, lanky guy with endearingly large ears who is super enthusiastic about pushing his students to push themselves, and is clearly teaching the class for educational reasons only. (I just said that in case some of you might wonder if he might have some evangelical ulterior motives in teaching a Quran class.) He insists on speaking only in fusha Arabic for the entire class period and demands we do the same, and it's awesome. In terms of the class work, basically all we do is work on a part of a Sura (i.e. Chapter) that our teacher picks for us to do for a week or two, trying to reason through every other word until we understand it all and then move on to the next one. It's not sexy, but it's useful and interesting. Our teacher doesn't have the whole Quran memorized, but he has whole swathes of it commited to memory, something he does not call attention to, but which I like to watch while everyone is reading from the printouts he gives us. I heard a rumor that he once was sent to jail by the Egyptian government, but I have no idea why. I keep hoping for an appropriate time to ask him about it, but it turns out, there is pretty much no such thing.
Nonetheless, this class has been the ideal addition to the rest of my classes as it gives me a chance to practice my spoken fusha. This is not actually an important skill per se for getting to know most any Arabs on any meaningful level (unless you consider getting laughed at meaningful), except fusha is what I'll be using whenever I interact with an Arabic speaker of a different dialect...until I start to learn that dialect. In other words this is what I'll be using over the next two months as I travel, and when I first get to Syria. Have I mentioned here that I'm going to Syria yet? Oh, well, I am. I'll write out my plans more once I actually know them.
While I set out to write mostly just about my classes in this post, I realize that this actually turned into a portrait of some of the Egyptians I will most remember when I leave here--that is, my teachers. This stands to reason obviously, because I have spent the most time with them of any Egyptians. More than that though, when I think about the generosity, warmth and patience of Egyptians, I think of my teachers first. Sure,they sort of have an unfair advantage in monopolizing all those good traits I associate with Egyptians given their job descriptions basically entail being generous, warm and patient, but it doesn't matter in my mind. They were all undeniably great teachers, and really couldn't have asked for much more from an intensive Arabic program, but on top of that, they showed the best of what Egypt has to offer. The appropriate Egyptian phrase here would be alhamduley, thank god
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