It’s been quite a while since I last posted here. It’s been a hectic time, with lots of things going on in my life (all good, I should emphasize) and I was up to my eyeballs almost every moment of every day. I’m back now and I look forward to fulfilling my earlier (neglected) commitment to post regularly and share my adventures with you!
You may remember my planned trip to Jordan from the first post on this blog. I did end up travelling to Jordan for three weeks, for what has been one of the most amazing experiences in my life so far. You’ll be happy to know my experience there has given me tons of new material and insights on the Middle East to share with you!
Today, I’ll touch briefly on what I did in Jordan and begin sharing some of those insights with you.
When I came across the unfathomable (at that point) idea of travelling to Jordan after my Arabic course, my goal was to find a location that would allow me to interact on a regular basis with native speakers and force me to speak Arabic, on a budget.
One of the more frustrating challenges for students of Arabic abroad is that locals will often insist on speaking with you in English (or your native language, if not English and if they speak it). This can significantly hamper your efforts to practice and diminish your self-confidence, and it takes a lot of effort to overcome. If you can find a place where people don’t speak any language other than Arabic, this will make your life much easier.
I decided the best way to find such a location would be to use workaway.com. In brief, this is a network connecting prospective budget travellers with establishments in different countries who are interested in hosting them in exchange for some hours of work. I came across such a location in Jordan,a tourist camp, reached out, and made the arrangements.
I spent three weeks volunteering at the camp, in a mountainous region of Jordan near a nature reserve, and it was simply amazing. The breathtaking views, the cultural and linguistic immersion, the local traditions, and the personal interactions blew me away.
My main role was assisting the camp manager in the daily tasks involved in running the resort – checking guests in and out, making sure accommodations were clean and ready, managing online reservations, you name it! The team consisted of 4-5 employees, both local Jordanians and Egyptians. With the exception of the manager, no one spoke English.
I could go on and on about this experience for days (those of you unfortunate enough to run into me will get hit with all the details). For now, I’m going to share some brief takeaways, things that seemed particularly interesting to me.
- Arabic dialectal differences are much more nuanced and fluid than they appear in textbooks – The local dialect of the region I was at made extensive use of phrases I had thought only existed in dialects from other countries. Two examples off the top of my head are the use of the word hassa meaning “now” (commonly used in the Palestinian dialect of the Wadi Ara region) and the phrase shlonak/shlonek – literally “what is your color” but used colloquially to ask someone “how are you” (associated with Iraqi Arabic).
What’s more, locals commonly mixed dialect-associated pronunciations and words. When studying colloquial Arabic, one the things you will learn is that two key factors that differentiate dialects are the pronunciation of the letter ق – which can be pronounced as a q, an a, or a g – and the word used for “now”. I’ll touch on both these factors in future posts, but for now I’d like to just mention that I came across native speakers of the Jordanian dialect of the region I came from mixing pronunciation of that letter and alternating the word they used to mean “now”.
To put this in perspective for my American readers, this was to me as if I had come across a native New Yorker saying “y’all” and alternating between New York speak and a Southern drawl. It just goes to show you how incredibly, richly complex this language is. - Time has a different meaning in the Middle East – One of the starkest cultural differences I came across I faced volunteering in tourism was the Middle Eastern perception of time. My personal experience was that time is much more fluid and relaxed – if someone tells you they will be there at 7 a.m., it may end up being 2 p.m. That meeting you scheduled for tonight may end up happening in 2 days’ time. This is probably a much healthier way of seeing things, but it did present a challenge when dealing with (mostly Western) tourists. To the credit of the camp employees, they do a great job of overcoming this challenge by providing prompt service to guests.
- Knowing the local language counts for a lot – This may seem obvious, but I was always surprised by how disconnected the non-Arabic speaking tourists seemed to me and all the colors of the picture that they missed. It made me very pleased with my journey and left me wanting more.
That’s it for today. I hope you enjoyed this post and look forward to hearing your comments. See you next time!