After spending 12 days on board a container ship, the start of my two-year stint at learning the Arabic language is almost at hand. On the 21st of this month I will be taking "Modern Standard Arabic 100" at the Arabic Language Institute in Fes (ALIF). I know almost no Arabic bar the alphabet, counting, and a few phrases, but at least I can find some solace in knowing something beforehand. I can also find some solace in my polyglot background, as I speak Dutch very well and "puedo defenderme" in Spanish. The difference in learning Arabic, of course, is that it is not a Romance language. Nor is it a Germanic one. It isn't even in the same language family. It is in fact part of the Afro-Asiatic family, which includes such groups as Berber (an ancient language that has remained mostly unchanged over the past 200 years), Chadic (which includes Hausa, spoken across a wide swath of west Africa), Cushitic and Omotic (two fairly similar groups which include many of the languages spoken in the Horn of Africa), Egyptian (the defunct language of those fabled pyramid-builders), and of course the Semitic group. The Semitic group includes Arabic, Hebrew, and Hebrew. This all basically means that Arabic is going to be very difficult. On a scale of 1 to 4, with 4 being the hardest, Arabic is part of "Group IV", along with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. And while I can breath a sigh of relief that Arabic has a manageable 28-letter alphabet- as opposed to the thousands of Chinese characters- the learning process should still prove to be a rather daunting task. But, having a mind that is wired for learning language should help considerably. In other words, the 2,100 hours that it typically takes for an average learner to speak Arabic at an advanced (almost fluent) level- which is my goal- should not apply to me. Perhaps it will take "only" 1,600 hours for me.  That is more or less 2 years and I have alloted myself this much time to study.

I am going to start my language training in Morocco primarily because it seems to have the most well-organized program for intensive Arabic in the Arabic-speaking world (minus AU-Cairo, which is prohibitively expensive). It won't be the most useful place to learn the language because the colloquial Arabic spoken here is far removed from classical Arabic. From what I have read, Levantine Arabic is most closely related to the classical form and thus the Levant would certainly be the more immersive environment for Arabic learning. After 6 months in Morocco I will therefore continue my studies somewhere in the Levant (most likely Jordan).

But Morocco should be an immersive environment in so far as newspapers and television is concerned. News broadcasts, some television shows, newspapers, and literature all use MSA. It is a literary language and spoken as a medium of communication between Arab diplomats, businessmen, etc. It would probably sound like Elizabethan English would to an average citizen of America or England, and so probably would therefore

not make much sense to the average citizen of any Arab country. But anyone with any kind of secondary education should be able to understand most of what I am saying. Needless to say, in much of the Arab world this is but a very small minority. But hopefully I'll be able to pick up some Moroccan Arabic and then, more likely, Levantine Arabic in the future. I will arrive in Fes on the morning of the 9th on a ferry from Spain after a 28-hour bus ride from the Netherlands. Fortunately, I will maintain some semblance of sanity by spending a night at a hostel in Granada to break up the trip. End of my first blog!!...