Re-learning my bad Arabic

I (Duffy) have Arabic class at lunchtime at the embassy. In theory, I have class for five hours a week but I am usually only able to attend two of the three classes in a week. The classes are to teach us “Jordanian” Arabic as opposed to the “high” Arabic which we were taught in DC. This means learning a lot of words over again. For example the high Arabic word for "to go" is “thehebe” but the Jordanian word is “roo.” Sure, roo looks like an easier word but it took me a long time to learn thehebe and every other word that I actually know in Arabic so it kills me every time the teacher says “oh, we don’t really use that word.”

The State Department grades languages based on how hard they are. I think Arabic is hard because (1) it has a different alphabet which is written right to left but mostly because (2) there are almost no cognates. Cognates are words that sound alike – if you heard in French “le chat” – you might guess that it means cat. Between Arabic and English there are very few cognates – some are computer words “al-internet” taken from English and in English most words that begin al (algebra, alcohol…) have some Arabic tie. But this lack of cognates means every word in Arabic I had to actively learn with almost no freebies (Arabic does have the same word for pineapple as German) and so when I find out that “we don’t really use that word” I feel like the hours it took me to learn it were wasted.

The good thing about Arabic class is that there are only 1-3 students and we can focus on very practical language. Today we practiced being in a grocery store. Arabic is a very polite language (I know quite literally 10 ways to say “how are you” and a perfectly legitimate conversation is asking “how are you” five different ways.) So today’s grocery store lesson in addition to learning some foods I didn’t know already – beets, turnips, spinach focused on the many, many ways a shopkeeper might say “how can I help you.”