tonight is my final exam in my arabic class. unfortunately, it's uncertain whether there will be a class next semester. the whole thing can be quite frustrating. i have been trying to learn this language for 5 years now and despite my dedication to the language, it is extremely difficult to ever achieve fluency even though i have lived only in major metropolitan areas and i have been determined to continue with my studies despite each dead end i run into. if you want one example of why this country is so woefully short on arabic speakers despite a good higher education system and several large arab immigrant communities, here is my story:
i first decided i wanted to learn arabic in 1998. initially i tried to teach myself the language. i managed to master the alphabet (though not the pronunciation) and a few simple words, but i quickly discovered that it is impossible to learn a language without interacting with others to develop an ear for the sounds. so in the summer of 1998, i signed up for an intro to arabic class that met once a week out of a community center on the north side of chicago. the class sucked. the teacher was an iraqi immigrant and all he had us do was memorize phrases from an arabic phrasebook interspersed with lectures about how great life was in iraq. (the guy was a christian who was a big fan of the hussein government because saddam's strict secularism kept the fundamentalists at bay. i wonder what my old teacher is thinking these days).
after that, i began to seriously search for a real class in arabic. i did a blind call to "american islamic college," a school i learned about just because i happened to pass the building while driving around chicago and found out that they offered night classes in arabic. the classes were amazingly cheap ($100 a semester) and featured a real professor teaching a real college level class. we learned "fuus-ha" or high arabic, the language of the qur'an and the educated classes in the arab world. the rumor was that the college was subsidized by the saudi government, hence the low tuition. most of my classmates were muslims who were taking the class for religious reasons, but not all. one of my classmates, jesus, was a mexican linguist. we joked that we had both jesus and mohammed in our class (actually, several mohammeds). so i wasn't the only non-muslim in the class, but i was the only atheist jew. no one seemed to care. in fact, i was briefly mentioned (though not by name) in an interview with my professor in the chicago tribune when noted that the college was open to students of all backgrounds and religions.
i took my first year of arabic at american islamic college and really learned to love the language. in 1999, however, my wife was offered her current job outside philadelphia. it was tenure track and we could not seriously consider turning it down, so we moved here, causing an interruption in my arabic studies. the interruption lasted for a full year. first, i had to concentrate on passing the pennsylvania and new jersey bar exams (remarkably, an illinois law license was not that marketable in philadelphia). in the summer of 2000, we went to tunisia for vacation. i was hoping to practice arabic there, but the street arabic in north africa is quite different from fuus-ha so i could not get very far. also everyone in tunisia spoke french, a language i have studied for seven years. so whenever i wanted to interact with anyone i could either struggle through articulating what i wanted to say in arabic or say it in french and it would instantly be done. the easier french route was hard to resist and within a few days i stopped even trying to do anything in arabic.
i came back, however, determined to pick up my arabic studies. i found a night class at philadelphia community college and took a year of arabic there. i had to start over with first year again–the year gap had cost me a bit of my language ability, plus at PCC they taught a different kind of arabic, a sort of fuus-ha colloquial arabic hybrid (which is actually a lot more useful since, in effect, i was learning two languages at once). the PCC class moved very slowly, there was a wide range of seriousness and ability among my classmates and the speed of our progress was determined by the slowest in the class. but i still got a lot out of it, and became good friends with several of my classmates and my professor. at the end of the first year, the core group of serious students scattered. one went to cairo, another north jersey, another just decided he needed a year off. in the end, there were not enough students to justify a second year class, i was the only one left who was really pushing for it.
when September 11th happened, there was much talk about new enthusiasm for the arabic language. according to news reports, colleges and universities were adding arabic programs left and right responding to a surge of interest among both students and the government. contrary to those news reports, i went the entire year unsuccessfully looking for a second year arabic class i could take in the evening after work. intro to arabic classes may have been crammed, but there were no second year classes. and one year of arabic is pretty useless when you consider how much time is spent at the beginning just trying to master the sounds and alphabet. i told myself that once the crammed first year classes graduated to the next level, more second year classes would open and i would find something.
i finally found a class in the fall of 2002. the university of pennsylvania had a 2 year arabic sequence at night. unfortunately, i would have to start over with the first year again and the first year class was full (about twice as many people had registered for the class as there were slots). i tried to talk my way in, i met with the professor and the head of the program. i talked them into giving me a placement test which indicated that i could skip the first semester if i wanted. but they would not agree to let me join in the second semester unless a whole lot of people dropped out during the first. the class was just too full.
a lot of people did. one thing about arabic is that it is an extremely hard language to learn. that's what i find so fascinating about it. it's filled with bizarre grammatical rules and a complex system of roots and patterns. the u.s. military rates arabic as among the hardest languages that it teaches. as a result the casual enthusiasm that drives people to decide to take arabic generally does not carry them far once they realize how much work it will be. at the beginning of the first semester 45 people had registered for a class that was capped at 21 slots. by the second semester when i joined, there were 12 people in the class, half of whom, like me, were not part of the original 45 who registered at the beginning of the year. so the huge surge in interest in arabic is not generating a huge number of arabic speakers. the drop off rate is so high, only a minuscule portion of the people who register for the intro class will ever develop any meaningful speaking or reading ability. and there is no reason to believe that the total number of people who are willing to go the distance is any more than the pre-9/11 numbers. in my experience, the people driven by 9/11 to take the class are the first to drop out. for some reason, one seems to need a different motive to carry through.
anyway, because of the large drop out rate, i managed to get into the second year for the first time after four years of trying in two different cities. once again, i got along well with a core group of serious students from my class. several of them had similar stories of unsuccessful attempts to learn arabic over the previous few years. when the class ended last spring, three of us continued to meet all summer once a week to study on our own. we worked our way ahead in the text book so that we were far ahead of the second year class when it started last September. (which was good, for it allowed me to go off to uzbekistan early in the semester without falling behind).
now that the first semester of the second year class is over, there are questions again about whether there will be enough people to have a class in January. we are now down to 5 people, right around penn's minimum threshold for a class. i just learned that one of my classmates accepted a job with the state department and is moving to washington at the end of the month (government recruitment is an ongoing hazard for arabic students. i have been spoken to about joining the military and foreign service several times now. we are a hot commodity, after all) even if we pull off a second semester class, there is always the problem of what to do after that. i'm trying to talk penn into adding a third year class at night. there really won't be enough students for a third year, but i am hoping that they will schedule their third year graduate level class in the evening so i can attend.
i don't know if i will be able to continue my arabic studies after tonight. but even if i find a way, i expect it will be a constant struggle to find a way to learn the language, just as it has been so far. there is clearly a broad consensus that our country is desperately in need of more people who know arabic, but in my experience nothing has been done to make learning the language much easier. while my reasons for taking arabic have nothing to do with the reasons this language should be a national priority, it really is surprising how limited the resources for learning arabic there are here.
