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One looks like a bird. Another resembles a wiggly snake with a long tail. Some look like lacy edging, with dots above and below a row of scalloped half-moon shapes. Slowly, these bits of Arabic writing are beginning to look like words to me. Yesterday, I recognized a word on one page in my textbook that I had seen and written three pages before. When I turned back to that page to check, I found that I was correct. I had recognized a word written in Arabic! What had all been completely nonsensical scribbles just three weeks ago were now beginning to take shape as ordered communication. And this has started me really thinking about the arbitrary nature of all writing systems. Why do our Latin alphabet characters look the way they do and not some other way? Why are some of the characters in, say, the Cyrillic alphabet so strange to our American eyes? How is it that we have come to associate certain sounds with certain written characters? And who came up with these systems of ...

"Did he say 'hadre-TIK' or did he say 'hadre-TEK'?" Eihab asked after one of the male students in my class tried to reproduce something a character in a short video had said. "A brief silence hung in the room, and then several of us chorused, "'Hadre-TEK'!" "Oh did he?" Eihab halted in his path through the row of tables, looking around with raised eyebrows. I had chorused back the feminine pronunciation with my classmates, but I honestly couldn't be sure. Discerning the nuances of these most foreign syllables was often a crap shoot. Most of the conversations we had listened to so far were a jumble of nonsense for the first few tries. Only after repeating single words ten or fifteen times, seeing them written in Latin characters, and hearing Eihab articulate them slowly for us could we even begin to recognize the beginnings and ends of words in the vignettes he showed us. "It is called 'Learning Ara...

Assalaamu c alaykum. I've heard this phrase a lot in movies and on TV, but I never knew what it meant until now. Nor did I know how to correctly pronounce it until now. After two days of Arabic 101, I can greet a person in a variety of ways, including a casual "hi" and the aforementioned more formal Islamic greeting; introduce myself by name; tell where I am from; express pleasure in meeting someone; and say thank you. All of this I can articulate in clumsy, deeply accented Arabic. Our professor, Eihab ("EE-haab"), is from Egypt and is very enthusiastic about teaching us his native tongue. From the moment our 90-minute class begins at 9:55 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Eihab moves constantly. He paces back and forth in the space at the bottom of our graduated rows of tables and chairs, flapping his arms and gesticulating with his hands as he repeats pronunciation of phonetics that are quite foreign to our Midwest palates. He often ventures up into the ...