Language - Melanie Bahti

As NSLI-Y students, our primary objective is to study the target language, which in our case is Modern Standard Arabic. However, this objective doesn’t come close to describing the language learning experiences we’ve had so far in Morocco. While our main goal is to improve our skills in MSA, its formality makes it difficult to use in our day-to-day communication with our host families and with other Moroccans we encounter. Since we’ll be living in this country for as many as seven months, we began our Arabic studies at the Center for Language & Culture with a week of Darija, the colloquial Moroccan dialect.

The teachers at the CLC are incredibly passionate about helping their students learn effectively, and we saw this passion from the first moments we spent in our Darija classes. We were taught almost exclusively in Darija, with the teachers only using English when they needed to convey a particularly difficult concept. As a result, we quickly began to recognize Darija words and phrases and understand them from their context, even if we didn’t have a complete idea of their meaning. In our week of lessons, we learned the language we would need to know for our day-to-day interactions with our host families, and the phrases we would need to communicate with taxi drivers, waiters, and shopkeepers. These phrases immediately became useful as we began commuting to and from the CLC on our own.

It’s a simultaneously humbling and frightening experience to be unable to communicate with other people. When you live in your own country and speak your native language on a daily basis, you take for granted how useful and efficient language is. Being let loose on the streets and markets of Marrakech with limited language skills made us all realize how important is it to be able to communicate with strangers. Our few phrases of Darija made a significant impact, however—even though I don’t know much more than a few landmarks and the words for left and right, I can hail a taxi and get home successfully. We have bargained in the souq in Darija, using only a handful of phrases (perhaps the most important being “I’m a student, not a tourist!”). Even the few things we can say and understand give us a greater degree of freedom and comfort. If I got lost, I could ask for directions or hail a cab with some degree of confidence.

Being unable to understand most of what we hear around us makes the moments of comprehension much sweeter. At the dinner table I listen to my host parents talking and savor the little jolts of understanding I get when I hear and understand a word, even if it’s only “school” or “air conditioning” or “bread.” Being unfamiliar with the Arabic alphabet is also a major hurdle that some of us are still trying to overcome. We have all been practicing. I don’t remember what it was like to learn to read and write in English, but it must have been just as challenging and painstaking as this. Despite the struggle, it’s very rewarding. It’s hugely satisfying to puzzle over a sign in Arabic for several seconds and find that it’s a word you know. And it always feels to me like an accomplishment when I tell someone something in Arabic and they understand. This morning my taxi driver managed to complain to me about the traffic, even though I only caught the word “very” in Darija and the French word for traffic.

For those of us in the group who speak French, our job is significantly easier, because most educated Moroccans speak good French and it’s common to see bilingual signs. Being about to fall back on French facilitates communication, but it also makes learning Arabic more difficult. I don’t have as much of an incentive to practice Darija because I know I can make myself understood much more easily without it. In addition, when I ask my host sisters for help with my Arabic homework, we have the conversation in French, which necessitates translating twice—once from Arabic to French, and then another time from French to English. I’ve found myself thinking more in French than English because of the immersion I experience in my host family; when I write in my journal I have to mentally translate from French to English, and my responses to people are reflexively in French.

Overall, I think we’ve all found our learning experience to be really immersive and enjoyable. We began our MSA classes this week and I can say that I’ve already learned a lot. Whether we’re studying grammar, or simple sentences, or struggling through the alphabet letter by letter, we are all making a lot of progress. I for one am relishing the small victories of an error-free sentence or a correctly pronounced word, and (despite the workload) I’m looking forward to the next thing we learn.