Category: Arabic

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Arabic travel Yemen

Studying and living in Yemen

I get the occasional email asking me about studying in Yemen and it occurs to me that I have not put up a post with that info in one place, so here goes…

Yemen is a great place to study Arabic. Everyone speaks it (after a fashion), the people are really nice, and it is cheap. For us western types, it is also an amazing cultural immersion.

The majority of Arabic language schools are in Sana’a, that’s where I stayed. I went to CALES in the old city. They are right in the center of the old city, so there is plenty of “atmosphere.” I took private lessons because that is the best way to learn and being in Yemen, I could afford them. When I started out, I didn’t know any Arabic at all. I was paired up with a teacher that knew English well enough to explain the basic stuff. Some people prefer having a teacher that speaks Arabic only. I dunno, I think I would have been too intimidated at first with all Arabic, but I do think it was useful later on. In any case, you can have it either way, you choose. All of my teachers were very good, but I had to keep some of them on point. I got the feeling that I was teaching him more about the US than I was learning Arabic, so I changed teachers. All of the teachers there were very knowledgeable about Arabic, I never felt that they didn’t know what they were talking about. I think they all have degrees in the teaching of Arabic…

There are other schools there as well. I have heard good things about SIAL and a couple of the others, but I don’t really know much about them. My gut feeling is that you can get good instruction in any of them. A lot of people also get private lessons (outside of an institute) once they make some contacts. That will cost less and be more flexible, but at the cost of not having any sort of document about your attainment level like CALES has…

Living in Yemen is part of the appeal of going there. All of the schools offer accommodations. If you’re there for a short while, it’s probably best to use them. CALES has two main buildings. The big one, and where most of the students live, is right next to the school right downtown. I lived in another building out towards the Sileah. EIther are fine…

If you’re going to stay longer than a few months, it pays to find your own place. Often times, there will be other students looking for housemates, just ask around. Foreigners tend to pay more than the locals do for housing, but it is still a much better deal than living at the school. I was paying $200 a month at both the school and the apartment. Of course I got my own apartment for that as compared to a single (large) room and a shared bathroom and kitchen…

Living in the old city makes it easy to get to class, that’s the main reason I lived there. I knew that if it was difficult to get to class, I wouldn’t go sometimes. There are some big issues with living in the old city though… The buildings tend to be quite old, and things like plumbing, electrical stuff, etc. can be a bit hit or miss. There is also the noise. The school buildings tend to be quite noisy, there is a lot of noise coming off of the street. Buildings in the old city tend to be very close to one another with very narrow streets, so it can sound like people are in the room with you. The trick is to live a little higher, if you can get up three stories or more, the noise level drops off quite a bit. I got lucky with my apartment, it had a walled courtyard that separated me from a lot of the noise.

If I were to this again, I would probably live in the newer part of the city. No, it isn’t as beautiful, but it is much easier to fine open restaurants, grocery stores, and anything else. If you want something to eat at 4 O’clock in the old city, all you’re going to find is french fries for the most part. It’ll take you upwards of half an hour to get to someplace that’s open in the new city… The apartments in the new city tend to have better plumbing and easier access to “high speed” internet.

The other potential advantage to living in the newer part of the city is that if you work, it will be easier to get to your job. Most native English speakers can find a job teaching English. You should be able to find a place offering $10 an hour with a little looking around. That doesn’t sound like much, but that’s doing pretty well in Yemen…

Anyway, I encourage anyone that wants to learn Arabic to check out Yemen. It is cheaper than many other places, and the instruction is top notch. If you feel that it isn’t right for you, it’s really easy to hop a plane to Syria, Egypt, etc. Drop me a line if you have any other questions!

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Arabic Religion Yemen

American being held in Yemen

There is a man from Philadelphia being held in Yemen. Read about it here. Everyone claims to have no idea as to why he is being held, but there are clues in the article. He had just come back from Sa’ada, the area up north (by the Saudi border) where there had up until recently been lots of fighting. That is supposedly over now, but the government is no fan of some of the Imams up there. Why was he up there? He had come to Yemen to lean Arabic, and the learn about Islam. I can tell you from experience that there’s no problem going there to learn Arabic. And learning about Islam isn’t necessarily a big deal either. But if you go to Imams that the government doesn’t like, they will be all over you. Ever since John Lindh got his training in Yemen, the Yemeni government has been uptight about foreigners coming there to study Islam.

I knew a couple from South Africa that had a terrible time getting through immigration in Yemen. They were dressed in their usual garb. The muslim population in South Africa tends to be pretty conservative, and both of them were obviously muslims. The government had multiple people question them about where they were going, what they would be studying, etc. They were only there to study Arabic, and he thought the only reason they let them in was because he was going to a state run Arabic school. On the other hand, I knew an Australian muslim that came to Yemen to learn the language. She dressed like any other Aussie, no problems. I also knew an Italian who cam there to learn Arabic, but he went to a mosque in the old city to learn about Islam. No problems.

So here’s my advice. If you want to learn about Islam in Yemen, don’t tell anyone you’re going to do that when you get to the country. And then, stay in the larger cities, there are plenty of Imams of all different viewpoints in the cities. If you go to hadramont, Sa’ada, Marib, etc. and it’s known that you are hanging out with the more radical types, the government will harass you.

I’m pretty sure the government has recently rescinded the do not travel warning, and there are lots of reasons to go to Yemen (unlike the ignorance shown in the article), but you have to be smart about going there. Don’t do stupid things and you’ll be fine…

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Arabic teaching

Now I’m confused…

I was chatting with someone I had met online (a brother of a friend from college) and he asked a question that has made my head spin. He has taught English in a variety of places so I was picking his brain about that. Out of the blue, he asked me if i had ever considered the Peace Corps. I admitted that I hadn’t, and we went on…

Afterwards, I couldn’t shake the implicit question about joining. It has some appeal, but there are some things that don’t. If I joined it, it would be another opportunity to live in a different culture, and everyone says that it is a great experience. On the other hand, it would be another 2 years of being poor…

They have positions in Morocco and Jordan. Those are the only places they work in where my language could possibly be of any use. It probably wouldn’t help much in Morocco though… If I went to either, I could continue my Arabic studies with no problem (which I could see being attractive again in the future). On the other hand, it might be a good thing to go someplace totally different. I dunno…

There’s always the option of just getting some certification and teaching for pay of course, but with the Peace Corp there is always the potential to do more.

At this point, I have a lot I want to accomplish (like being able to walk a couple of miles again) before I even consider anything like that. Still, I’ll be wondering about it…

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Arabic

That was draining…

I had my first 5 hour session today, and boy am I tired. It was good though. I did more Arabic in that class than I have in the past 4 months probably. I have the rest of the week to digest what was introduced. I’m a little worried that I may have created a monster, I mentioned that I needed to learn more grammar and Mahmoud readily agreed. He made it clear with his introductions that I have a very long way to go in my grammar studies… Anyway, I like the new schedule so far, the long class allows us to cover things in much more depth than the two hour class. Now all I have to do is try to do a little each day that I’m not in class so that I can build on this, wish me luck….

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Arabic

Arabic Names

Arabic names kill me. Most of the non-Mohamud related ones (Ahmed, Mahmoud, etc.) are just words. They name their kids “beautiful,” “pigeon,” “smile,” and even “justice.” I have a student in my conversation class whose name is Batool. She’s one of the better students in the class, but her name keeps throwing me off. Batool means “virgin” in Arabic. Who’d name their kid virgin?

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Arabic

First lesson went well

I just had my first lesson since I got back, it went well. I was a little afraid since I hadn’t really done any Arabic for a couple of months. I read the stuff well enough, the only trouble I had was with new words (and that’s natural). The cool thing was that I was starting to to pick out what form the words I didn’t know were in. Were they a gerund, a participle, or the noun form? I’m getting there… I’ve asked Mahmoud to drill me on the forms that the verbs can come in, it feels like not having that knowledge is now holding me back. I’m dreading it a bit, memorization has never been one of my strong suits, but it’s time to buckle down and “get” this. Onwards and upwards!

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Arabic

Still in the states

I’m up at my aunt’s place for a couple more days, then I’ll head back down to VA for the final flurry of seeing people before I leave. It’s going to be a little harried, but it’ll be good. I’m really enjoying my trip up here in Connecticut, I love visiting these guys. This will be the last time that I’ll be able to visit my aunt and cousin at the same time, Beth is getting married in July and will move out to the western part of New York. I saw some pictures of her in her wedding dress and almost shed a tear, she’s so lovely. I now have an idea of how fathers feel when their daughter gets married…

I haven’t done a damn bit of Arabic this entire trip. I knew that was going to happen, I briefly thought about not bringing my books this time, but I figured that carrying them around would be my penance for not using them. I think that I’ve made the mistake of equalling the language with the situation in Yemen. It’s just depressing over there. When I tried to get a list of acceptable songs together for my students, I listened to several Beatles songs. I distinctly remember thinking that one particular song had been recorded in 1967, think about how much the US, Europe, and our culture has changed in that time. Now think about what Yemen must have been like in 1967. There weren’t many places that had electricity, there weren’t any paved roads between cities, and they were essentially living like their ancestors lived 500 years ago. Many places in Yemen haven’t changed much since 1967, and it’s depressing. How can a place stand still (or go backwards) for so long? Sure, there are a lot of symptoms that we can point to, but the causes are buried and difficult to find. I have to find some way of divorcing those thoughts from the language itself, maybe then I will attack my studies like I used to…

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Arabic

Arabic newspapers

I’m trying to decipher the newspapers here. I’ve talked about the headlines before, now I’m diving into the actual stories. So far, my opinion of the writing isn’t a very good one. I translated an article dealing with that entire debacle in Libya where a bunch of nurses were going to be executed for infecting kids with HIV. It seemed pretty clear to the rest of the world what happened, it was accidental and was caused by the substandard medical facilities there. Anyway, the article said that the punishment was reduced from execution after She(it) payed restitution to the victims. The prefix on the verb could have meant either a female or an organization or group whose word had the feminine gender. The article had mentioned the Libyan government earlier, and government is considered feminine, but that didn’t make much sense. I asked Adel who or what paid restitution. “Who do you think?” Well I didn’t know, I was expecting the article to tell me… “It’s the Bulgarian government of course!” When I asked how on earth I was supposed to know that since they had not been mentioned in the article at all he said, “A native speaker just assumes that it would be the Bulgarian government, there’s no need to actually say it.”

I find that telling on two counts. First of all, an American newspaper editor would never let that slide. Second of all, the assumption of the Bulgarian government being involved, to the point of not mentioning it, says a lot about the political situation in this area of the world. The expectation of government supplied money goes deep here, I hadn’t realized how deep until today..

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Arabic

Classes start tomorrow

I haven’t been doing any Arabic studying for a month or so. I have been talking on and off, and just like my other breaks, I feel that I am more comfortable with the Arabic that I know. Of course I also realize that there are some words that I have forgotten, they just aren’t coming to me when I need them. That’s easy enough to fix, review is always easier than learning new stuff. I’ve also been scanning some of the Arabic newspapers and I feel that I’m getting more out of them. I still can’t sit down and read them, but I’m getting the idea of a lot of headlines now. there’s two problems with me and the headlines. The first is that I just don’t know all the words. That’ll come with time. The other problem is that often times the headlines don’t make any sense. They only hint at what the article is about as opposed to summarizing it. Many times, I don’t really know what the article is about. I’ve been told that this is on purpose.
The newspapers in this part of the world tend to be written in a more literary style than the US. I’ve been told that this is because when they were released from colonial rule, they didn’t have any newspaper tradition at all. The governments went to the only writers that they had access to, men studying Arabic and Arabic literature. The press here is frequently criticized for being too editorializing and not facts based enough. I’m betting that their headline writing is a symptom of this.
I’m hoping that in the next part of my class, we’ll concentrate more on the papers and perhaps doing some more word drills. I’d like to have some text in front of me and be forced to identify the subject, object, predicate (which doesn’t necessarily involve verbs), masdars (gerunds to us English speakers), participles, etc. It’ll be about as thrilling as it sounds, but it will help me considerably. The dictionaries for Arabic frequently only list the roots of words, so if I’m looking for a participle, gerund, plural, or any other number of variations, I could very well be out of luck unless I can spot the root. If I come across a word I don’t know (which is very frequently in the papers), I usually need to know what part of speech it is in order to look it up.
I consider this progress. At least now I know what I need to know in order to learn more… I’m also hoping that studying will be more interesting if it’s primarily reading. We’ll see how it goes…

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Arabic

Good Luck

We just got in a new housemate from Italy. We talked with him for a bit last night and got some basic info about the whys wheres and hows of him being here. Turns out that he’s a programmer and his employer wants someone that can communicate in Arabic and/or read instructions in Arabic so that they can branch out into this world. So what did they do? They sent him here for 3 weeks. He doesn’t know a lick of Arabic and he will be here for three weeks to learn what his boss wants. He’ll be taking 6 hours of class a day, but even with that, there’s no way in hell anyone could be useful in this language in three weeks. With 6 hours a day, the chances of him remembering a majority of what they go over in class is close to zero. I’ve been in this country 8 or 9 months and I’m just now getting confident enough to talk to people regularly. No, I’m not the world’s best language student, but still, this is a tough language, three weeks? Give me a break…

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