Learning Arabic II

My Arabic lessons have continued steadily since they began in September.  I am making some progress, but it is slow.  I was proudest of one of my recent homework assignments, which was to write out the story of Little Red Riding Hood.  This was excellent writing, vocabulary, and grammar practice, and a whole lot of fun.

The assignment I had to turn in today was a set of sentences using the complicated numbering system in Arabic: number one has a masculine and a feminine form, number two gets shortened, changed to masculine or feminine, and attached to the end of the noun it modifies, numbers three through ten have shortened forms that follow a plural noun, and numbers 11-100 use their long forms after a singular noun. 

As I exited the staircase on my way to class I encountered my good friends and informal Arabic teachers— Ibrahim the janitor, Hashem the security guard, and Ahmad the maintenance worker.  Ibrahim and Hashem are my most persistent instructors, and it was Ibrahim that came up with a creative way to help me remember the days of the week.  He assigned a day to the men that regularly work here.  He himself is Goma (Friday) and Hashem is Khamis (Thursday).  Ahmad has become Ilsubt (Saturday).  The rest of the days are randomly assigned to whoever is standing around at the time.  Even though I have moved beyond these vocabulary words, Ibrahim finds this a hilarious joke that he repeats nearly every time he sees me. 

So this morning when I ran into these men and they saw me with a notebook they got all excited.  When they found out I was going to an Arabic class, I offered to show them my homework and they seemed thrilled.  Hashem is the most literate of the three and he took charge.  After reading the first sentence he asked me for a pencil.  He and Ahmad carefully went through each sentence, correcting the spelling (the grammar, surprisingly, didn't need correction).  When they reached sentence number six and found no errors I was congratulated enthusiastically.  By the time they finished all the sentences I was late for class, but I had (almost) perfect homework.  It didn't occur to me until later that Ibrahim had quietly disappeared when the homework came out.  In spite of his enthusiastic teaching, I have been suspecting that he is functionally illiterate.  A large portion of Egyptians are, and that contributes to many of their economic and social problems.

Needless to say, I had some explaining to do when I handed in my homework.  Fortunately, my teacher is very laid back and was entertained by the story.  It turns out that Ahmad and Hashem were assuming that I was writing in Modern Standard Arabic so several of their corrections weren't quite right for my assignment in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic.  Nevertheless, I sincerely appreciated the time these men take to encourage me and help me out.  Language lessons are not at all part of their jobs, but they, like many Egyptians I have met, seem to make it their personal mission to help all foreigners learn their language.  As Arabic is as hard for English speakers as Mandarin Chinese, we can certainly use all the help we can get!