Once is Not Enough

Assalaamu calaykum.

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 rows of tables, selecting a student by pointing at her and intoning a greeting or vocabulary word to be repeated, then leaning close to hear and evaluate her response. He also darts frequently to his Mac, connected to the room's AV system on a tall metal cart to the right of the projector screen pulled down in front of an old-fashioned green chalk board, to click on an icon from the textbook's companion website. Images of native Arabic speakers greeting us from Tunisia or Sudan animate on the screen as we all lean forward a bit and strain to understand the alien sounds they make.

When Eihab went through all 28 phonetic sounds of the Arabic alphabet on our first day, he gave the impression of an orchestra director. Standing slightly sideways in front of the big white screen with the written characters displayed in four columns of seven, he pointed to one at a time with his right hand and vocalized it in deep, richly accented tones.

"Ehh! Eh!" he sang, pointing to the aleph, "Beh! Beh," pointing to the next one.

Meanwhile, his left arm swirled rhythmically down, toward his midsection, up along his sternum, and out toward us, palm up and fingers elegantly splayed. That left hand circled down and up, inward and outward, over and over, as if indicating the breath his diaphragm pushed into his lungs and through his vocal chords to emit the sounds we dutifully repeated.

Occasionally, he interjected comments or encouragement between phonetic syllables.

"Oh, you're going to like this one!" "This one is easy!" "Montaztic!"

That last one, he told us, is Arabic for fantastic, and he exclaimed it almost every time one or all of us succeeded in reproducing a sound or phrase. He is also quite fond of high-fives.

I haven't been in a classroom as a student in a year and a half. And the past three months were almost completely idle for me. Oh, sure, I dabbled in acrylic painting and read a lot of books and did some gardening and housework and such. But from the middle of May until this week, the first of September, I did exactly nothing of a sustained, challenging intellectual nature.

I swear, these last two weeks, I could actually feel my brain atrophying.

So it was particularly invigorating to begin my foray back into mental stimulation with such an energetic and enthusiastic professor. The other students—almost a dozen young men and about eight young women (and they are all much, much younger than I am)—all seem quite engaged in Eihab's electricity. Indeed, there is simply no way a person could be idle or bored or discretely distracted by a cell phone in Eihab's class. He had us out of our seats and greeting each other in Arabic within twenty minutes of the start of our first class.

"Once is not enough," he reminds us, as we try formal and informal greetings, helping each other to sort out the sticky vowel and consonant sounds we stumble over. He sings to us a portion of a phrase, and we chorus it back to him in a call-and-response that rises and falls with his balletic arm movements.

By the time class ends, I am jazzed and buzzed with the excitement of learning. I believe I can feel new pathways forging in my gray matter.

I have several reasons for taking this class.

First, the university pays for it, so it effectively raises my total compensation. And what kind of crazy person would not collect some part of her paycheck?

Second, I have read that active language learning stimulates the brain in key ways that may stave off diseases like Alzheimer's and actually improve memory and thinking skills. The migraines I experience are said to signal increased risk for dementia, so I figure this could be at least a balance to that, if not a corrective.

Third, since completing my graduate program, I have felt increasingly removed from the academic mindset and schedule. I hope that taking this class will keep me tuned-in to the semester cycle and re-activate those organizational skills that helped me succeed as both an undergraduate and graduate student: time management, discipline, perseverance.

Fourth, a lot of the students who come to me for tutoring are Arabic-speaking, so I'm hoping more familiarity of how Arabic works will help me understand the mistakes these students make in English, and maybe help me help them do better.

An unexpected fifth reason: Eihab's class is fun!

I had forgotten how pleasurable it is to begin to absorb a new language. Our latest trip to France in late spring pretty much humbled me, as I had let my speaking and listening skills atrophy. And when language skills are not practiced regularly, they quickly dissipate.

The ESOL class I was volunteering in has disbanded, so this Arabic class is also a stand-in for all that great cultural and linguistic interaction. This time, though, I am the student and not the teacher, and that feels particularly comfortable. I've missed being a student: clear deadlines and assignments, regular evaluations, concrete measures of success and failure.

I had thought at the beginning of the summer that my time as a student was over, that I was moving into the realm of full-time, grown-up worker bee. That, however, did not come to pass. The whispy promise of a full-time position for me fell victim to the now-infamous budget cuts that our entire university community is still reeling from.

The Arabic class and this blog are my way of making lemonade then. I am returning to the two things in which I have had unequivocal success: being a student and writing.

When I get frustrated or down about my circumstance, I need only listen to my professor's melodic advice: Once is not enough.