Listening (in)comprehension

Friends with Words is a newsletter about language, culture, and identity, created by a Russian-born Israel-based writer, linguist, and single mom.

It's for people who believe that curiosity can heal the world or at least make it slightly less horrible. It’s also for those who are tired of hearing slogans and polarizing opinions about our complicated region and who just long to hear real-life stories from a person living here.

One morning, as I boarded the bus, I overheard the driver and the ticket inspector, who was standing next to him, conversing in Arabic.

I decided to sit in the front seat intended for the elderly and the disabled (the bus was nearly empty) to hear them better. It’s not often that I have a chance to listen in on a whole conversation in Arabic. I wanted to see how much I understood.

I have been listening to lots of Arabic on YouTube, but it’s not the same as listening to real-life conversations. You can’t slow down a real conversation to a manageable 0.75 rate of its normal pace.

Also, when you listen to videos of your choice, you’re acquiring vocabulary around those specific topics. So the minute people start talking about something else, you’re lost.

Unlike your algorithmically determined YouTube feed, real people can talk about an infinite number of topics. I wish someone would invent a way to program the universe to show you only people with specific interests (and of specific political orientation) in your daily feed.

We’d feel so much more in control of our lives this way.

Because as it stands, the sheer number of words one needs to know to eavesdrop on strangers’ conversations in one’s chosen language is just staggering.

My peculiar vocabulary

On YouTube, I mostly watch the same two or three shows on the Israeli Arabic language channel.

My favorite one is called Bala mu’aakhdhe (بَلَا مُؤَاخْذِة), which translates as “I don’t mean to insult” and is a version of the Australian show “You can’t ask that!” In it, people from different marginalized groups (or groups that have been stigmatized by society) come and voluntarily answer sincere questions from the audience that would have been inappropriate to ask in person.

I like it because I’m not only learning the language but also learning about Arab Israeli society.¹

I’m learning that it’s not a homogeneous society (something that I knew but didn’t encounter closely until I started learning the language), that there are very religious people (both Muslim and Christian) and barely (or only nominally) religious.

I’m learning also that today it seems to be a community where modernity exists alongside (and often has to defend itself against) deep-seated conservatism.

Some examples of groups of people that have been interviewed on the show are divorced women, women who chose to stay single, trans people, people with eating disorders, and parents of special needs children.

As a result, I have acquired a very particular vocabulary (mustashfa “hospital”… lazm astafragh “I need to throw up”… mashlul “paralyzed”… )

One time, in the city center, my sister and I overheard a Wolt delivery guy shouting something in Arabic to another delivery guy across the street. My sister asked. “Do you understand what he’s saying?”

“Nope,” I said. “All I can say with certainty is that he’s not talking about being recently divorced or having an eating disorder.”

Also, here is a reality check. Even if you have enough general vocabulary to understand 50% of a random conversation, it’s often not enough to understand the specifics, because the gist is usually in the remaining 50%, the words that are specific to that topic. Even 80% comprehension can be a frustrating experience.

Do I get a free ride?

On that bus, I wondered what if, even though I mostly still listen to the same show, my vocabulary magically expanded to enable me to understand conversations between bus drivers and ticket inspectors.

The ticket inspector (an older man in his 60s) was the one doing most of the talking, in a friendly but authoritative way, and the driver (a younger man in his mid-20s) was mostly listening, sometimes asking questions.

But no matter how much I strained my ears, apart from very general vocabulary, I couldn’t understand what they were talking about.

It sounded something like this:

“The problem is…. It is better here than… More than… You’d think that… but…. After all, when you… In this city… I always… because in the end… ”

Finally, I caught the word shamaal, which means ‘north’ and concluded that they were comparing life around here and in the north of the country. It made sense: the older man was gesturing and pointing at houses and things out on the street.

But something didn’t quite add up. And that something was the fact that as people were getting on and off the bus, the ticket inspector didn’t check anyone’s tickets. It was a little strange that he was just leisurely chatting with the driver the whole time.

At that moment the older man said the first phrase that I understood fully “Abdulrahman, al el-yamin” which means “Abdulrahmann, to the right” (and frankly sounds nearly the same in Hebrew 🙄) and I realized that he was not a ticket inspector but a driving instructor supervising the young driver’s first run of the bus line.

And that the word that sounded like shamaal “north” was actually the word shmaal “left.”

Oh well, I’ll just cling to the fuzzy sense of accomplishment that I understood something, and that at least Arabic and I are in a better place today than we were at around this time last year.

Stages of language learning

The early stage of learning a language — for me, it’s that first crazy-exciting month — is like building a Lego tower. Every day — every hour, even — you see the tower getting bigger, piece by piece, right in front of your eyes. It’s immensely satisfying.

But this stage — when you know the grammar and the basic vocabulary and are now growing your vocabulary to be able to talk about and understand all sorts of topics — feels like tending to a garden. Progress is slow, incremental, and barely noticeable.

Every video I watch (and every conversation I overhear) is like watering the garden a bit more. I hope.

I can only hope and trust that it is doing something in there, deep in the soil, to the budding seeds.

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1. When I say “Israeli Arabs,” I mean Palestinian Arabs who are citizens of Israel, not Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza.