Since people keep asking about my Arabic classes; alhamdulillah, while it does pose some difficulties, I am learning. The differences between my classes back and my lessons here are pretty significant. I’m taking private lessons at my teacher’s house, and the focus of my class is to learn classical Quranic Arabic, with the aim of being able to understand the Qur’an, ahadith, classical tafasir, etc. Since I’m not sure of how long I’ll be in Istanbul, I figured it was best to focus on reading and grammatical knowledge; speaking and writing will have to wait for now. Which, when I think about it, is probably for the best. Learning to speak Arabic here would be kinda atrocious.
Why? Well this brings me back to a major difference in teaching approach between the Berkeley/Alif Baa and Al Kitaab curriculum. I remember reading somewhere in the preface to Al Kitaab, I think it was, that the authors believed that it was indeed possible for non-native speakers to learn to pronounce the letters and speak Arabic correctly. That sure isn’t the traditional Turkish approach to Arabic. Outside of the tajweed sections of my lessons, my teacher speaks and reads Arabic in what I can only call the Turkish Academic dialect of Arabic (’cause Turks who speak Arabic natively, those from the country’s southeast, border areas, etc, pronounce things correctly, pretty close to the Syrian dialect). ﻭ makes a ’v’ sound, ﻅ and ﺽ read as a ‘z’ … and fathas make an ‘e’ sound, in addition to other differences. Ya Rahman! It’s really confusing. I don’t want to read/speak with that accent, but it’s pretty difficult to repeat after my teacher during class and keep fixing half the vowels and letters — and it feels slightly obnoxious to repeat my teacher’s ‘ke-te-be’ as ‘ka-ta-ba’ every time. I know it shouldn’t feel that way, I mean some Arabic sounds come more naturally for native English-speakers than native Turkish-speakers, but it still feels a little rude/uppity. Sigh. It’s also difficult to swith to tajweed after two or three hours of mispronounced Arabic; I have no idea how my teacher does it so smoothly as I stumble along, trying so hard to pronounce the letters right now that I can hardly pay attention to the rules of tajweed.
All that aside, though, I’m pleased with my lessons themselves. My biggest difficulty is scheduling time for them. I work from 10-7 Sunday-Thursday and from 10 till after midnight on Fridays. Saturdays are my only off-day, and I take about three hours of Arabic on Saturdays, but that’s not nearly enough in terms of time or frequency. I keep trying to make it out of work an hour early on Tuesdays and Thursdays so I can get in at least an hour of class, but my work schedule can be fairly unpredictable and so I can’t always make it out — and this problem is compounded by the 50-minute commute between work and my teacher’s house.
But alhamdulillah overall. I’m really fortunate to have the opportunity at all to learn Arabic and tajweed here. I remember how impossible it was to learn the kind of Arabic I need and even find a female tajweed teacher in the Sates. So alhamdulillah for the opportunity to go through all these ‘difficulties’ in taking my lessons.
1 Comment
April 1, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Roberta, I don’t know what you’re talking about… fethas indeed do make an “e” sound unless they are on “strong” letters like Ha, Kha, Sad, Dad, Ta, Dha, ‘Ayn, Ghayn and Qaf.
e.g., MuHAmmEd