I say tomato, you say "banadurra"

Last week I did a language trade ("I'll help with your English if you'll help with my Arabic" kind of deal) with Farouq, a Professor of Computer Science at Yarmouk University on his "Dumon", a 1000 square meter plot that serves as a large garden. He showed me how to water his tomato plants (which he does once -- total -- before they give their fruit), how to harvest "kusa" (a zucchini-like vegetable), and he said a lot of things that I couldn't understand.

Farouq speaks with an accent, and was charged by one of my teachers to help me with "Amia", the local Jordanian dialect of Arabic (there are actually several within Jordan, and the manager of the movie store we frequent told us that he finds people from the south of the country -- physically closer than Durango is to Denver -- generally unintelligible). It was the second time that I had met with him, and was doing considerably better than the first, but was still having trouble following much of what he said.

Now, when most people (ourselves included) say that they are studying "Arabic", they are actually studying what is called "Modern Standard Arabic", or "Foos-ha". Foos-ha is a strange language, because, really, no one speaks it on a regular basis except for newscasters. Nearly everything, however, is written in Foos-ha, and, for all intents and purposes, it tends to be similar to most countries' "Amia". And, for the majority of the trip, I really believed that.

In addition to chatting with Farouq, I have also made friends with the manager of the falafel shop across the street from our dorms. He is Egyptian, and easy to communicate with, a fact I gave little thought until this week when I was sitting, watching the news with him when two of his Egyptian friends came over. I could barely understand the gist, the general area even, of what they were trying to communicate to me. Likewise, they were having intense difficulty understanding what I wanted to say, which I, of course, interpreted as mispronunciation (which may have been a part of it). Suddenly, though, as my friend began relaying to me what they were saying, and relaying to them what I was saying, I realized that he has been easy to understand because he speaks to me in Foos-ha. His friends, however, did not understand Foos-ha to the point where he had to translate my Foos-ha into Amia so that they could understand it. I was speaking Arabic, and they were speaking Arabic, but we needed a translator nonetheless.

It suddenly dawned on me that it is as if I am walking around Irbid speaking like Shakespeare without meter (and with a few "cools" and "hips" thrown in). Daphna is my little Juliette, and, despite the success that we have experienced in four short months, there is a long way to go before we will ever walk into a store in this part of the world, and have someone ask us where in the country we're from. Daphna suggests that two more years of living here and taking classes might suffice.

But Farouq is still trying. On Saturday he invited me to a "guy's night" where we and a couple of his friends played cards, ate melon with knives, drank apple juice, and talked about bad words in multiple languages. I could understand a great deal of what they said, and they all liked asking questions about proper usages and pronunciations of English words. Nonetheless, had they wanted to, they could have made many jokes at my expense without my knowledge. But at least my partner and I swept the night's games.

I guess, for now, that will have to do.


Your Arabic words of the day:

To play cards -- La-ebah el-waraq -- لعب الورق

Love is from God (an expression suggesting that you can't choose who to love) -- "El-hob meen Allah" -- الحبّ من الله