“Ahlan!” said my professor when I walked into my first day of my master’s in Arabic class a month and a half ago. I stammered for a response, feeling completely unprepared as my “Teach Yourself Arabic” book sat on my desk gathering dust the entire summer.

“Ummm in English please?”

I never got a response in English, only more Arabic. Within minutes of my very first language class we were already forming sentences and reading letters. I sat there confused and embarrassed at my lack of knowledge, cursing myself for even trying this.

This is my second master’s degree. After finishing my first,  for which I researched and wrote about Arab portrayals in American cinema in a post-9/11 society, I longed for fluency in Arabic that would give me a little more professional credibility. Luckily, I could make the change seamlessly into this new program at my same university in Scotland. Two weeks after finishing my first master’s I was well under way of my first year of my second master’s degree, in a subject I had absolutely no solid experience in. What on earth was I thinking?

After getting by for a week in Morocco on my holiday last winter, I thought my Arabic skills were decent. I was gravely mistaken. Now I was faced with not only learning how to speak and read a new highly, inflected and complex language with different versions for both writing and speaking, but also an entirely different alphabet (with different symbols).

Now I watch how studying gobbles up my free time: five hours a day in class, five days a week and hours of homework as I try desperately to absorb this odd sounding language. Every day I wake up and it’s a gamble: will I be completely in the dark or will I be able to understand a third of what’s going on in class? Will I feel utterly stupid or just slightly stupid? I find myself struggling, flailing and grasping to keep my head above water. I stutter out crude sentences in class, in my strong American accent: “Ummm…andi…umm…bayt…ka…kabir.” (roughly transliterated as “I have a big house” not including the “umms” of course). I am quite sure that to everyone else I sound like I have a major disability. And I am sure a few of my classmates have even secretly questioned my intellectual abilities.
But the weeks have passed, and I’m learning and doing more than I would have ever believed. I hope so. I’m moving to Syria for the summer, come next May.

While I might stand a very good chance of being laughed out of the Middle East at the mere sight of the funny American girl blubbering like a child. I am eager for a comfortable fluency when forced to live and breath this language.

I do know that a lot of good things come as a result of a lot of hard work. Two long years from now I sure hope that holds true.

I may be a little weary by then, but at least I won’t accidentally order vegetables when I want bread.

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