Three Months into Living in Egypt

Just one month before, I was living life in Greenville, South Carolina, around family and friends, and everything made sense. I logically knew all the steps I had taken to get here, but looking around at 2 am, I found it easy to forget.

I am standing in the desert, on the side of a 12-lane highway after my Uber kicked me out because I wanted to pay with a card instead of cash.

To be honest, I had plenty of cash on me. I was just too stubborn.

But the moment I stepped out of the car, I started to think more clearly. I’m 30 minutes from home, need another Uber heading away from the city at 2 am, and the data on my phone plan is about to run out.

I have become quite good at putting myself in classic “pride comes before the fall” moments. But thankfully God is still gracious to idiots like me, and I made it home that night.

But why?

If you are asking how I got here in the first place…

Hi! My name is Drew and three months ago I moved to Egypt to further my linguistic studies by learning colloquial Egyptian Arabic. Here are a few other stories from my short time here so far:

Childish Confidence

I am studying Arabic using the Growing Participator Approach (GPA for short). Instead of a teacher, GPA has a language “nurturer” who often does not speak much English. 

The first 100 hours are referred to as “Phase 1” and they will humble you fast. For most of Phase 1, you spend your time pointing at pictures and gaining recognition of vocabulary. You even start speaking for about the first 30-40 hours. 

When I was allowed to start trying to speak, I was really excited because of how long I had to wait. But I had way more confidence than I should have had with the level of Arabic I was operating with. 

I was often so certain I was right in moments when I was blatantly wrong. On one such occasion early on, I was practicing counting and said:

تـَما َنيـَة تـِسعـَة عـَشـَر َة حا َجـِب

Tamanya TisAa Aashara Haegib

Eight Nine Ten Eleven… eyebrow?

With a childish level of confidence, I had replaced the word eleven with the word for eyebrow. Despite my teacher’s confusion, I was so convinced I was correct that I repeated myself multiple times. For a split second, I even thought she could be getting something wrong in her own language. 

For the next month, I could not say eleven without my teacher pointing to her eyebrow and laughing. 

The Tables Turned

Outside of language school, my brain has struggled to recognize that I am no longer part of the majority language group where I live. 

About a month ago, I became quite proud of myself for how my Arabic study had been going. Every time I had the chance to say a sentence or two to my Uber driver or someone in the street, I was so proud of myself.

During this time, I was sitting in a restaurant that was showing the Manchester United game on one of its TVs.  Every five to ten minutes, one waiter would walk past and try to speak any English that he knew with me. 

At the moment, I thought it was sweet and was very willing to have what little conversation I could with him, but I was also trying to watch the game. 

Anyone who keeps up with the Premier League knows that Manchester United is not a joy to watch this season. As I began to get more frustrated with the game, I had less and less patience for Ahmed’s English sessions. 

Hours later I was telling some friends this story and for the first time, it clicked for me that I am Ahmed. 

I walk around every day bugging every Egyptian I see with what little Arabic I know. They are almost always friendly and welcoming, but I am not able to accomplish that much yet. If anyone should be allowed to pity someone else for their level of language, it definitely isn’t me.

I am proud of how far I have come in the past three months of learning Arabic. But it only took one kind Egyptian waiter to make me realize that pride had so easily snuck into how proud I was of my progress.  

Think Like an Egyptian

Something I knew intellectually before this process began but have come to experience daily is how linked [1] culture and language are.

Yet often when we are learning a language, we think in our native language (L1) and then translate words into our target language (L2). This does not seem like a big deal, but it presupposes multiple ideas that are false.

1.        There is a one-to-one translation for every word between L1 and L2

2.        Both L1 and L2 developed as Languages in isolation from culture

I still get caught off guard whenever I walk into a business at 3pm and one of the workers greets me by saying “sabaah ilcheer.” To start off with, it’s difficult enough due to the sounds that we don’t have in English. But secondly, when my head does the translation to English, these words mean “good morning.”

Yet whether it is the fact that Egyptians do not quite think of a day as split into AM and PM like an American would or just the cultural habit of sleeping in and staying up late, saying “good morning” at 3pm makes sense.

The underlying issue is that they were never saying good morning in the first place. They are saying “sabaah ilcheer.”

My head is approximating the two terms because I already have a “box” (or schema) for the phrase good morning. This makes it easier for me to remember “sabaah ilcheer”, but also develops a naïve idea that there is a one-to-one equivalent for every word and phrase between Arabic and English.

But that’s a lie my head tells itself to make memorization easier.

Both Arabic and English have not been “cooked” in isolation, but each one within the cultural pots and pans that they were placed in.

While sometimes difficult, this is the best part of learning a language.

Every day I learn more about myself, particularly my tendency to become puffed up and prideful. Yet language has a funny way of always humbling me in one way or another.

And every day I learn more about how to connect with a whole new part of the world. Whether that is in the practical sense with new words or in the ability to understand the people and their worldview a bit better.

[1] Or “hitched” as my two-year-old, train enthusiast best friend Jonah would say.