Should I talk or should I not?

and will I be understood if I do?

Ines, my mom's new carer, is an Arab Israeli woman from Ramle, a town twenty minutes drive from ours.

My mom, we were told a few weeks ago, is in the early stages of dementia.

I’ll just leave this sentence here while my brain processes its meaning.

It might take a while.

Until we figure something out, my mom stays in her apartment, within walking distance from me and my sister.

Ines came after a succession of carers were not a good fit. They’d come and politely ask my mom if she needed help with anything and when receiving a negative answer would join her on the couch watching TV.

When Ines arrived, she looked around my mom's messy apartment, then turned to me and asked in Hebrew: At habat shela? “Are you her daughter?"

I mumbled “Umm.. yes…?” (I wanted her to know that it’s not just me, that my mom has four kids who don’t excel at cleaning… ) but Ines continued: Ein be'aya, ani ahye habat shela. "No problem I'll be her daughter."

I was just grateful that someone was finally taking charge of the situation.

She said she needed me to come over next Tuesday and, while my mom was at a seniors club, help her rearrange the furniture in her apartment because the current setup made cleaning difficult.

Naturally, I decided it would be the perfect opportunity for me to start learning Arabic.

Because, I suppose, it’s easier for me to deal with life challenges, such as war, single parenting, and aging parents, if I add to them a purely cognitive challenge of learning a new language (or twelve.)

Besides, I can't help but feel that the time spent on domestic tasks is the time I could have spent on changing the world, which is what I'm here to do. If I'll be practicing Arabic while moving furniture (or whatever else Ines wanted me to do), I'll be at least moving closer to that goal.

The thing is that I want to learn this language because it’s the native language of 20% of Israeli citizens, but it's a different “want” than if I wanted to learn, say Maori. Maori would have been an exciting challenge because it’s so different from everything I know. Arabic is a lot like Hebrew, and languages I’m already familiar with don’t excite me as much.

Also, because I have a complicated relationship with this language, I knew that the surest way to enjoy this process would be to find someone I like and want to talk to.

I liked Ines.

Which Dialect?

I decided to go with Language Transfer, which teaches Egyptian Arabic, simply because it’s become my favorite language-learning app.

There are many different dialects of Arabic.

Even in Israel and Palestine, there are several dialects. The Arabic in northern Israel is different from the Arabic spoken in East Jerusalem which is different from the Arabic spoken by Bedouin Arabs. Sometimes even adjacent villages can have differences in vocabulary or pronunciation.¹

The further apart they are geographically, the less mutually intelligible they are. So, Moroccan Arabic and Iraqi Arabic, for example, are as distinct as Spanish and French.²

I figured Egypt is close enough so Egyptian Arabic is probably understood here.

The language cupboard

Every time I introduce a new language, I get sort of panicky at first. Like, where exactly will I fit it all in my head?

Will my brain explode? Will it make a big stir-fry out of all these languages? And it’s not like I’ve stopped learning the other ones. I have a problem with letting them go.

But every time, once I start, somehow - I don't know how - it just works.

The best way I can explain it is this. Imagine you're playing a new board game. Then you're introduced to another one, with totally different rules. And then another one. You can play many games in a row (because maybe there is a pandemic or a war and you’re stuck at home with your kids), all with different rules, and you probably won’t get them confused (and if you do you'll quickly notice it.)

That’s because seeing the game, its box, and its pieces reminds you of that particular game and you don’t think about the other ones while you play it.

It's the same with languages. When I speak one language, my brain doesn't take the other languages out of the language cupboard.

This process also gets easier the more you do it.

After all, if you’ve never played a board game, it will take you a while to get the hang of your first one. But the more you do it, the faster you learn new ones. Because you basically know how they work, many games share common features, and, most importantly, your brain is used to this type of learning.

A throat workout

The main difficulty with Arabic for me was its consonants, many of which are produced by using the parts of the vocal tract that until now I’ve only used for swallowing and coughing.

There is a consonant called “glottal stop.” You produce it by briefly stopping the flow of air with your vocal folds (also known as ‘glottis’) and releasing it. This sound actually exists in the English language unbeknownst to its speakers. You can find it in the middle of the exclamation “uh-oh!” or, if you speak Cockney English you use it instead of “t” in the word “butter.”

There are two “pharyngeal fricatives” - consonants that are produced by creating friction in your pharynx, the part of the throat in the middle of the neck, just above the vocal folds.

A “voiceless pharyngeal fricative” is the breathy h-like sound you make when breathing on your glasses to clean them, or to revive an old gel pen.

A “voiced pharyngeal fricative” is a sound you’d make if you were breathing on an old gel pen at a birthday party when everyone started singing “Happy Birthday” and you decided to join them but forgot to readjust your throat to its normal position.

Finally, as if that was not enough throat exercise, some ‘normal’ consonants (d, t, sh, and th) have “pharyngealized” or “emphatic” variants (the back of your tongue is retracted when you produce them.) Try blowing on a gel pen while getting ready to sing “Happy Birthday” and then say t at the same time and you’ll get pretty close.

But the good news is that its morphology (word structure) is pretty easy. Like Hebrew and other Semitic languages, it’s called a root-and-pattern morphology (I’ll tell you about it later.)

I started learning Arabic on Monday, and by Monday evening finished 20 (out of 38) Language Transfer lessons (I don't have a car or a dishwasher which means I get to do a lot of listening while going places and washing the dishes). This was enough to start having (very) basic conversations.

Not speaking

On Tuesday, when I came to help Ines, I had breathed on a lot of imaginary gel pens, and came armed with such useful constructions as “it is clean” and “where is…” and “I don’t know where…”

Only I didn’t get a chance to use any of these.

I couldn’t.

Every time I tried to open my mouth and say something in Arabic, it suddenly felt profoundly idiotic to do that.

Ines was there with a purpose, not to listen to my broken Arabic no matter how amazingly advanced it was for only three hours of learning.

I already felt like a loser not knowing how to use my mom’s vacuum cleaner or turn on her washing machine. Would it help my standing with her if I said “I don't know where the broom is…” in my very slow beginner Arabic instead of in Hebrew?

Probably not.

Besides, I suddenly remembered how annoyed I was when strangers, especially when I lived abroad, would try to practice their Russian with me. Like, who told them I wanted to be their language practice pad or wanted to speak this language at all?

You can’t reduce a person you just met to their culture and language. What did I know about Ines? Nothing. I knew that she was Muslim and that she was from Ramle.

In the end, all I got the courage to do, was ask her, at the end of our cleaning session, if she happened to know of any children's content in Palestinian Arabic because I just started learning it.

She was frying schnitzels and she seemed to soften when she said that her kids are grown now and she doesn't remember what they watched when they were little. Then she added, shaking the frying pan, that by the way her best friend in Ramle is also a Russian speaker called Tanya.

Oh, and when I did say something in Arabic she couldn’t understand a single word. She said that Egyptian Arabic is pretty hard for her to understand.

In other words, I just wasted 3 hours of my life on a dialect I’m not interested in learning.³

Photo by Vladislav Klapin on Unsplash

1. I thank Ori, the owner of Spot from the dog park, for sharing all this with me.

2. The distinction between a dialect and a language is not a linguistic one but a socio-political one.

3. Ori from the dog park could have told me all that had I thought of speaking to him earlier.