The Syndrome

"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 Arabic Syndrome,'" he said, continuing on his route through the tables. "You're going to see things that aren't there and hear things that don't exist. It's normal. Don't worry about it."

He's right. The very brief exposure we've had so far to the sounds and characters of the Arabic language has tricked us to some extent. Our little brains are trying desperately to link these new sights and sounds to something we already know. Often, the newness of them works like a force-field, making them bounce off our old knowledge and defy memory. They are so new and foreign that our minds simply cannot understand them or hold onto them for any length of time.

This is why Eihab's mantra is 'once is not enough.' The repetition will eventually imprint the sounds and characters into new pathways of memory, but it takes diligence. And time.

I had a student Wednesday afternoon who told me he wanted to check the grammar in his short essay because his first language is not English.

"What is your first language?" I asked, not wanting to assume from his olive skin, dark hair, and thick accent.

"Arabic," he said.

"Ahlan wa sahlan," I said with almost no hesitation.

"Ahlan!" he replied, briefly touching his hand to his chest and bowing slightly. "Thank you!"

The rest of our session went exceedingly well—as in textbook perfect well. I pointed out that he seemed to have difficulty with when to use definite articles, as well as when to use a 'to be' helping verb with a progressive tense.

"I know this is tough because there are no articles and no 'to be' verb in Arabic; isn't that right?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. A brief explanation of both grammatical points seemed to make sense to him, and we ended our session on a very positive note.

I felt I had made something of a cultural break-through. Not only could I help him with English grammar, but I could reach out to him in his own native tongue, if only with an informal greeting. And then I was able to offer some empathy about the difficulty of learning English.

And suddenly I felt like my super-power really was language.

When I worked at a coffee shop during my undergrad studies, the philosophy major I often worked with would often pass the time by playing 'what would your super power be?' with the customers. I always wanted to have the ability to learn any and every language perfectly just by listening to it. Or to have one of those gizmos from The Matrix that you could plug into your brainstem and simply upload a new language into your cerebral cortex and instantly speak it perfectly.

The class I'm taking isn’t working that quickly, but it is working. I can identify individual letters in a line of Arabic script, and I can sometimes pick out several individual words when we watch a video of Arabic conversation.

I do, however, often go completely blank when Eihab asks me something in class, something I have repeated several times already. And if I don't study the textbook a little bit every day, the script begins to look like squiggly lines of nonsense.

But that's just my Syndrome playing tricks on me. I won't worry about it.