What’d I say?

Inzain! (Great!) I’ve reached the bit where I can occasionally speak Arabic!

Some of you might recall that I’ve been taking Arabic for almost three years, and could be thinking, “It’s about time you can occasionally speak Arabic, Sydney… for Christ’s sake.”  But here’s the thing –I wasn’t studying Arabic the way most people really speak it.  I was studying FusHa, the international lingua franca of the Middle East and North Africa.  Exceedingly formal, it’s essentially Qur’anic Arabic with concessions made to modern vocabulary needs.  It’s the language of internationally broadcasted news stations, business, diplomacy, and academia.  And because no one country can really claim it, there is no set accent.  The accent you use to speak FusHa largely depends on how thick your professor’s native accent was.

Cue utter confusion upon reaching a country with regional vocabulary, pronunciation, and verb usage.

Now, if anyone were writing me memos in Arabic, I could have communicated quite effectively.  But Omani colloquialisms have been leaving me dazed and confused (for so long it’s not true… I’ve been on a Led Zeppelin bender recently) for several weeks.  The word I’ve been using for “what” all this time, “ma”, means “no” or “not” in Omani.  Words like “yes”, “good”, and “why”, personal pronouns, and the pronunciation of normally-recognizable sounds are completely different here.

Cue my joy upon realizing that this week I’ve been talking to my host mom with very little trouble.

Our conversations are limited.  We aren’t discussing anything, rather asking the other about our days, chitchatting about the house, and keeping each other informed.  But when she tries to give me more rice (I learned “rooz”, here they say “aiysh”) I can say “no, I ate a big snack this afternoon at school, thanks.  No really!  Augh I think I was smaller before I arrived in Oman…” and when it turns out that I have to stay at school all evening, I can say “Tomorrow a group of students from Jordan is coming to school, so I’ll have to stay there for the evening.  The bus will bring me back home when we’re done, though.”  I can say those things in FusHa, but now I can use Omani words and sentence structure to express the same thought.

While I was doing homework in the living room today my host mom came to look at my reading and asked how much of it I understood.  “A word here, a word there… not all of it, but I have my dictionary.”  “Yes, this looks hard… it’s really too bad you’re only here for three months.  After a whole year your Arabic would become much better.”  I agree completely, but for having just a few weeks under my belt I don’t think that I’m doing too badly.