“The Best Way to Learn Arabic in Palestine is Through Immersion: Fumbling for words and finding family: I stick my fork into a sweet, sticky, gooey desert known as Knafeh here in Hebron and a bright and bubbly five year old girl shouts over and over:
‘Zaaikee! Zaaikee!’
It means tasty in the Hebron dialect of Arabic and is a word I will fondly remember learning. This practical learning experience has become common place and key to my language development here. I fumble over the words whilst they slowly repeat the vocab I need to know for day to day living with a traditional family in Hebron.
At first the unfamiliar dialect was frustrating and felt alien to the Fussah (formal) Arabic I had been learning for a year. However, I have only been here a week and I am rapidly picking up the nuances and starting to swap the dialect for the Fussah. For those of you with basic Arabic forget the Ureed and pick up Bidee, forget the la mushkalla and pick up mish mushkalla and forget the athab ila and pick up rouha.
Everyone is more than happy to help especially the youngest in the family who revel in giving Arabic lessons. Even if sometimes they fall into fits of giggles as they hold an apple and tell me it is a potatoe! One of the girls in the family, who is 15 years old, loves to get me to repeat after her ‘Kayf hal’ aaaaaaak?’ essentially ‘How you doin’?’ (wink wink, nudge nudge) whilst I joke back to her: ‘No, this is Haram!’
Sometimes it is not so easy and my basic Arabic does not always seem to provide a huge advantage. However when the vocab seems impossible there is always Google translator! I will be here for two months so I hope, little by little, my vocabulary will expand and I will no longer be Google translator’s most active user. Insha’allah! In the mean time I grow closer to my friends and family here, laughing with them as I fumble for new vocabulary.
