Arabic Immersion

This semester, instead of doing what I did in the fall and take regular Hebrew University classes, I decided to enroll in the first ever Arabic Immersion Program here at Hebrew U. Basically what this means is that I no longer have any free time during the week. At all. Classes go from Sunday to Thursday (the week starts on Sunday in Israel and ends on Friday, because of Shabbat), from 10:30 to 6:30, with a couple half hour breaks thrown in. That’s eight hours a day, five days a week, which is a very, very long time to be in class. Especially when that time is spent struggling to understand a language that makes learning Hebrew look simple by comparison.

Most of our classes are Arabic, but we also have an hour and a half devoted to an introduction to Islam on Sundays and Thursdays, as well as different cultural workshops on Mondays (belly dancing), Tuesdays (art), and Wednesdays (movies and stories).  On top of the classes and workshops, we have field trips every Tuesday, where we visit local sites related to our studies, such as the Islamic Art Museum in Jerusalem, or nearby Arab villages.

As I hinted at earlier, Arabic is a difficult language to study. It has a 28 letter alphabet, which is made far more complicated by the fact that the letters are written differently depending on where they appear in a word. So even though Arabic has only 28 letters, you have to learn four different ways to write each of them (independent, initial, medial, and final). And on top of that, some letters aren’t allowed to connect with any other letters that may follow them. For example, the letter alif can be connected to a letter preceding it, but not to a letter following it. The letters are also divided evenly into two categories, sun and moon letters, and the sun letters can sometimes overpower a following moon letter, robbing it of its pronunciation. This means that though you continue to spell the word with the moon letter in question, you don’t pronounce it when you say the word. Confused? I am.

To make things even more difficult, we’re kind of learning two languages at once. Modern Standard Arabic, or MSA, is a recent invention, used almost exclusively for writing, and never spoken. Meanwhile there are a ton of regional Arabic dialects, all of them different from MSA, (Egyptian, Palestinian, etc), which are spoken but never written (there’s also literary Arabic, which differs a bit from MSA, but I’m not going to get into that). The differences among the dialects are so great that someone from Tunisia or Morocco would find it nearly impossible to understand anything someone from Syria or Lebanon is saying. Our program is teaching us both MSA and the Palestinian dialect (called shaami), which is overly confusing right now, but should be better once we become more familiar with the language.

Alright, enough about Arabic. Here are some pictures from our first field trip, where we went to an Arab village just outside of Jerusalem, called Abu Ghosh. 

The Islamic Art Museum, which we visited before going to Abu Ghosh.

Abu Ghosh

Enjoying some of Abu Ghosh's famous hummus!

A minaret, as seen from the garden of a church built by the Crusaders.

Olive tree

View from a hill in Abu Ghosh

A church in Abu Ghosh that we visited.

We visited a centuries-old Crusader church in Abu Ghosh, and were fortunate enough to have one of the monks there sing for us. The church had amazing acoustics; amplifying and echoing the monk's already beautiful voice. I could have sat and listened to him all day. I took a quick video, which I posted below. If you listen closely, you can hear the Islamic call to prayer in the background towards the end of the video.