Getting to grips with guttural utterances when learning Arabic

Suzanne Harrington is learning to speak Arabic

There are 28 letters in the Arabic alphabet. Each of these letters looks different, depending on whether they are at the start, the middle, or the end of a word. And over or under any or all of them, there might be a dot, a squiggle, or an accent, which totally changes the way the letter sounds, and changes its meaning. This does not include the dots that are permanently over some of them. So you could have a letter that has, say, three permanent dots, and then you add another dot or dash or squiggle — often so small you can barely see it — and the letter becomes something else. It’s like maths, but worse.

This is before you ever try to say anything. Not only are there 28 letters, but there are sounds in Arabic that don’t exist in English — Arabic doesn’t do ‘p’, for instance, because much of the sounds are coming from further back in the throat.

“Imagine you are at the dentist,” says the teacher explaining how to make these new letters. “You know that noise you make when the dentist is poking around the back of your mouth? That’s it.” Another letter, she says, is the sound you make when you are feeling “slightly sick.”

She tries not to laugh as we work in pairs, practising our being sick noises. Ironically, the reason I am here is because Arabic sounds so beautiful — and it does, when the teacher speaks it (not that we understand a single syllable), but when we try, it sounds like a roomful of cats bringing up furballs.

The teacher explains that Arabic is spoken in 22 different countries from Abu Dhabi to Morocco, all the way south to Somalia. And naturally, each place has its own version — so we are doing Modern Standard Arabic. The student on my left is a native Sudanese Arabic speaker, here to learn the standard version. This does not feel encouraging.

The student on my right is an interpreter who speaks five languages, including Russian and Dutch, and is staring blankly at the Arabic alphabet, looking a bit pale. After two weeks, we have learned four letters, and can say hello-how-are-you-nice-to-meet-you-goodbye without referring to our notes. We high five each other. It’s like we have discovered the genome, or fired up the Hadron Collider.

I like a challenge. I tried to learn flamenco once, until the teacher basically said, go home you’re drunk (I wasn’t— just left-footed on both feet). I also like what Lily Allen said recently about having never once needed Pythagoras theorem or used a bunsen burner since leaving school. (How about yourself? No? Me neither). But language is different. Apart from keeping your brain from shrivelling into a dried-out old walnut husk, while giving your teacher a good laugh, it is active. You can use it. It is alive. It opens doors, and removes barriers. And sometimes it accidentally creates them — the Arabic word for ‘pigeon’ is the same as the word for ‘toilet’, apart from a tiny dot. What could possibly go wrong?