Arabic is Hard

As I mentioned in my previous post, I flew to Qatar for the purpose of taking the DLPT for Arabic's Levantine dialect.  Just for the heck of it, I also tested for Egyptian, even though I don't speak a word of it.

My results go to show hard the Arabic language is.  I bombed both tests.  On a three point scale, I scored a 1 for Egyptian and a 1+ for Levantine.  Egyptian was no surprise, but the Levantine score came as a huge shock.

Partly I think the test was bad.  I'm a 3/3 in Modern Standard Arabic, and I'm spending two hours every morning with my tutor talking about high-level political and economic issues in Levantine dialect.  Next week I'm preaching at my church in Arabic.  But according to my DLPT score, I only have a passing familiarity with survival phrases and basic day-to-day tasks.

On the other hand, I can't just blame the test.  Despite my 3/3 MSA scores and my ability to read or listen to political news almost fluently, I encounter many contexts where I can't understand a word that's being said.  Put me in a circle with a bunch of Jordanians who are talking to each other on the street, and I'm fortunate if I can get the main topic.  The test is right about one thing: I don't understand spoken dialect nearly as well as I want to.

Why do I mention all this?  Much of the DOD and US government recognizes that we need more foreign language capacity, but not many of them realize how hard it is to close that gap.  The bureaucratic system also reduces language capacity to a one-size-fits-all number, the DLPT score.  The system has faith that this number captures everything they need to know about a linguist's ability.  That is a bad assumption.  The significant gap between my Modern Standard Arabic and dialect scores suggest something of how complex language learning is, and how much time it really takes to become proficient.  Fortunately I have a year left in Jordan.  This test gave me a kick in the pants to work even harder on my dialect ability.