Arabic

I'm back taking Arabic lessons again, been about a year since I last took lessons. This will make the third time I have taken an Arabic course.

The first time was sponsored by work and was from the Qatar Centre for the Presentation of Islam. The teacher was a very nice Iraqi gentleman by the name of Mr Kamal. The courses were free and, not surprisingly, consisted of 50% learning Arabic and 50% learning about Islam. In the end most of us found that talks about Islam more interesting than the Arabic but there was the occasional heated debate since there were a few devout Christians in the class and at least one Hindu. Once the class ended I had a reasonable knowledge of the script, numbers, how do tell time and a few basic sentences but unfortunately there was no intermediate class so I couldn't really progress.

The next year I took classes at CHN Institute, taught by a Jordanian lady. Learned a bit more on the speaking side but we did not focus on reading/writing Arabic. After the classes ended there were plans to offer an intermediate class but for some reason I couldn't make it, and that was that.

Thankfully due to demand at the office we now have lessons twice a week during lunch, this time from Qatar University. They offered both a beginners and intermediate class so after taking a placement test I was allowed to take the intermediate class. It is taught by a Lebanese gentleman and has so far been the hardest of the three courses that I have taken. It is immersion, the teacher speaks no English during class, and we are expected to write our homework in Arabic script, which I did not have to do in the previous courses. We also received DVDs so that we could practice lessons at home. So far so good, as long as I keep working at it I should get through the class without being completely lost. Luckily a few people in the class are excellent at understanding Arabic (just not good at reading and writing it), so if you're not understanding what the teacher is saying at least there is someone to ask. There are also people in the class who are near-fluent in writing Arabic but cannot really speak the language so there are people you can check your writing with.

I know what you are probably thinking, why are there some people who can read/write it but can't speak it and others who can speak it but weak at writing? Well it generally depends on where you are from. There are countries where the majority of the population is Muslim but the spoken language is not Arabic (Pakistan for example, Turkey is another). As most Islamic schools emphasise being able to read the Qur'an in Arabic Muslims in these countries are taught Arabic script in school so that they can read the Qur'an but since they do not speak the language in everyday life they do not really learn to converse in it. Plus the Qur'an is written in what is called Classical Arabic, which is not the verbal Arabic used in day-to-day life. I will assume an analogy is Middle (Shakespearean) English, English speakers can understand his works but nobody speaks in Shakespearean English anymore.

[Update: I was off the mark about Pakistanis learning Arabic from Qur'an study, Urdu uses Arabic script -- see the comments section]

On the flipside I have just learned from a Kenyan colleague that Swahili is very similar to Arabic and share about 70% of the words. A speaker of Swahili can generally understand spoken Arabic though Swahili is not written anymore using Arabic characters -- about a hundred years ago Swahili switched from being written in Arabic script to Latin script. So if a Swahili speaker has no training in Arabic script they would roughly understand the language but not know how to read/write it. Turkish went through a similar change, switching from Arabic to Latin script in the 1920s, although Turkish only shares about 25% of words with Arabic.

Time to finish my homework. Ma'assalam.