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.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Qatar
So it was a rather odd decision on my part to voluntarily return to Al Udeid this week. I wanted to take the Defense Language Proficiency Test (DLPT) for the Levantine dialect of Arabic, but the test isn't offered in Jordan. The math was pretty simple. I could pay around $800 for airline tickets, a hotel room, and a rental car in Qatar. Depending how I scored on the test, I would earn between $100 and $300 of bonus pay each month for the next year. The trip would more than pay for itself.
The first thing I'll say is that Qatar looks much better from the window of a 5-star hotel than it does from the Deid. I'm reminded of Orson Scott Card's fantasy novel Hart's Hope
, in which visitors to the capitol are presented with a totally different city depending on which gate they enter through. Doha International is definitely the gate you want.Doha is a curious city. One evening I sat along the corniche for a while, dangling my feet over the turquoise water of Doha Bay, staring at downtown and trying to figure out why it looked like a science fiction painting. Then it hit me. After 3D artists build virtual cities for movies, they apply textures like red brick, transparent glass, or glossy white plastic. In the hands of an inexperienced artist, these textures never look real. They're too perfectly uniform, too flawless. It's easy to make a gleaming city of the future, but it's much more difficult to add the dirt, grime, and broken windows that make a city believable.
That's what's wrong with Doha. Nothing is old. It's too shiny, too perfect, all neon and sparkling glass. The city feels like a vast construction project. Cranes are everywhere. Alongside many major roads you see orange and white barriers, bulldozers, and piled construction materials.
Doha looks like a pleasant place to live, but like the other Gulf states I've visited, there's not much sense of history or culture. Doha has some impressive sights like the world's largest Islamic art museum, but these can be seen in a day. Its historic souq--or market--is full of franchise coffee shops and Baskin Robbins. It pales beside its ancient counterparts in Morocco, Egypt, or Syria. I could be wrong, but it seems like culture in Doha means getting rich off oil, then loading your family into the luxury SUV and going to the corniche for a picnic.
I was pleased to see how diverse Doha is. Exploitation of migrant workers does occur in many contexts, but it also seems that many workers find a good life here. For every Arab family lounging in the grass at the corniche I saw two or three Indian, Sri Lankan, Pakistani, or Indonesian families doing the same.
It was a little surreal driving my rental car from Doha to Al Udeid. If you spend any time at the Deid, you start to feel that it's a remote island in a separate universe. Believe it or not, Doha and Al Udeid do actually share the same universe. You can drive to the Deid in about half an hour. Thank God, if you're an Olmsted scholar and aren't actually assigned to the base, you can also make the drive back.
Monday, June 7, 2010
What he said
When I travel with my kids I'm too busy to follow much news, so it came as quite a shock when I picked up a Moroccan newspaper and read that Israel had attacked the flotilla destined for Gaza. That suddenly explained the string of text messages I was getting from my US embassy in Jordan, warning me to avoid anti-Israeli protests which seemed to be cropping up everywhere.
Of course the attack is old news now, and pretty much everything that can be said has been. So I'll just link to this excellent post by Andrew Exum, which pretty much sums up my perspective. I particularly agree with his comments about Israel's lack of strategic vision, something I've written about before. I'm completely blown away by how foolish and how incompetent this attack was.
While I was in Morocco I read Audrey Cronin's excellent book How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns. A major theme of the book is that terrorism poses the greatest danger when it provokes governments to overreact and do stupid things. Governments can quickly undermine their own legitimacy and mobilize populations against them. Israeli policymakers might want to read the book.
Of course the attack is old news now, and pretty much everything that can be said has been. So I'll just link to this excellent post by Andrew Exum, which pretty much sums up my perspective. I particularly agree with his comments about Israel's lack of strategic vision, something I've written about before. I'm completely blown away by how foolish and how incompetent this attack was.
While I was in Morocco I read Audrey Cronin's excellent book How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns. A major theme of the book is that terrorism poses the greatest danger when it provokes governments to overreact and do stupid things. Governments can quickly undermine their own legitimacy and mobilize populations against them. Israeli policymakers might want to read the book.
Back from Morocco
I returned this morning from an eight-day trip to Morocco with my family. It's totally exhausting hauling a toddler and baby in backpacks around the labyrinthine souqs of Fes and Marrakech, but we had a great time.
I'll admit that I never had much desire to visit Morocco, Tunisia, or Algeria--mainly because I didn't now anything about them. I knew they are Muslim countries but not Arab. The people speak Arabic, but not real Arabic. The dialect is unintelligible to outsiders, and French is the language of daily business. I knew that life in these countries is heavily influenced by the French colonial experience, and I've never been that interested in France either. Nevertheless, friends told me that Morocco is a great country to visit and I knew that understanding these countries is an important part of my regional education.
I was pleased to discover that I loved Morocco. Because I knew virtually nothing about the country everything was a pleasant surprise.
The geography is stunning and diverse. I was amazed at how green much of the country was--a luxury I no longer take for granted after living in water-scarce Jordan. Most gas stations and rest stops had a garden out back, with soft green grass and playground equipment. My son wakes up early, so to prevent him from waking up other hotel guests I took him each morning to the park. I would order a croissant and a coffee and a cup of banana juice at one of the many cafes, and we would sit in the park and eat our breakfast. The simple luxury of pleasant outdoor spaces is one of my favorite things in Morocco. From Fes we undertook what became a thirteen-hour drive through the Atlas mountains to Marrakech. Along the way we stopped for lunch in the college town of Ifrane, which is as green and beautiful as many college towns in the States.
The culture in Morocco defies description. European, African, and Arab cultures all seem to collide and interact in unexpected ways. Near our beachfront hotel in Casablanca hip young Moroccans in Western clothes hung out in nightclubs and Western restaurants. While walking on the same street in the morning, I came across a Moroccan wedding party in traditional Moroccan clothes dancing and playing drums. I'm not sure if they were beginning their celebration or ending it. It was 5:00am. Wahhabism is on the rise because of extensive Saudi influence, but I'm told that most Moroccans make fun of the "beardies" and that Islam plays a more moderate role in Morocco than in most Arab countries.
In the countryside we came across quaint little towns that look like they were transplanted from Germany or France--except the token church at the town center was replaced with a mosque. In other places I felt like I was driving through the poorest parts of Alabama or southern Georgia. Still other places resembled stereotypical images of African poverty. I mistakenly programmed our GPS to avoid major highways, so we entered Casablanca via back roads framed on either side by vast slums (which were, of course, studded with satellite dishes).
Fes and Marrakech both consisted of old and new regions. The newer parts of each city resembled their European counterparts. In the newer region of Fes, you could visit a different cafe every day for a year. While you drank your coffee you could watch Muslim women in sweatsuits and hijabs jogging, or Westernized youth walking to school. A kilometer away you could enter the gates of the old city and watch history wind back a thousand years. You could spend hours shoving your way through the winding narrow streets of the souq, competing with pushcarts and donkeys laden with crates of Coca Cola. Turn off the main streets--as we did one time--and you will find yourself in a labyrinth of identical alleys and homes populated by staring children. Marrakesh played up its exotic "oriental" side; the snake handlers and trained monkeys made me think of Indiana Jones. When we had our fill of oriental wonders, we slipped inside a modern restaurant to escape the brutal heat and ate banana splits.
I was pleasantly surprised with my language ability. First, it was encouraging when I read billboards and street signs, most of which were written in both Arabic and French. I couldn't read more than a few words of French, but I could read the Arabic almost fluently. The same thing happened with spoken language. It's an encouraging feeling to realize that my Arabic has improved to the point that I can handle it much better than any European language. A highlight of the trip is when a waiter, upon hearing my Arabic accent, asked me, "What is your nationality? Lebanese or Syrian?" It's the first time that someone mistook me for being Arab after I started speaking.
Of course the language has its difficulties as well. The Moroccan dialect is fast, is heavily mixed with French, and is very hard for a foreigner to understand. Although my wife and I could understand enough to survive, we never understood more than ten or twenty percent. On some occasions I had no idea if the other person was speaking French or Arabic. When a parking attendant started talking with me, I stopped him and explained that I do not speak French. "Oui!" he exclaimed (the French word for yes). "I am speaking Arabic!"
I'm spending today recovering from an exhausting week of travel, and trying to catch up on a week's worth of news.
I'll admit that I never had much desire to visit Morocco, Tunisia, or Algeria--mainly because I didn't now anything about them. I knew they are Muslim countries but not Arab. The people speak Arabic, but not real Arabic. The dialect is unintelligible to outsiders, and French is the language of daily business. I knew that life in these countries is heavily influenced by the French colonial experience, and I've never been that interested in France either. Nevertheless, friends told me that Morocco is a great country to visit and I knew that understanding these countries is an important part of my regional education.
I was pleased to discover that I loved Morocco. Because I knew virtually nothing about the country everything was a pleasant surprise.
The geography is stunning and diverse. I was amazed at how green much of the country was--a luxury I no longer take for granted after living in water-scarce Jordan. Most gas stations and rest stops had a garden out back, with soft green grass and playground equipment. My son wakes up early, so to prevent him from waking up other hotel guests I took him each morning to the park. I would order a croissant and a coffee and a cup of banana juice at one of the many cafes, and we would sit in the park and eat our breakfast. The simple luxury of pleasant outdoor spaces is one of my favorite things in Morocco. From Fes we undertook what became a thirteen-hour drive through the Atlas mountains to Marrakech. Along the way we stopped for lunch in the college town of Ifrane, which is as green and beautiful as many college towns in the States.
The culture in Morocco defies description. European, African, and Arab cultures all seem to collide and interact in unexpected ways. Near our beachfront hotel in Casablanca hip young Moroccans in Western clothes hung out in nightclubs and Western restaurants. While walking on the same street in the morning, I came across a Moroccan wedding party in traditional Moroccan clothes dancing and playing drums. I'm not sure if they were beginning their celebration or ending it. It was 5:00am. Wahhabism is on the rise because of extensive Saudi influence, but I'm told that most Moroccans make fun of the "beardies" and that Islam plays a more moderate role in Morocco than in most Arab countries.
In the countryside we came across quaint little towns that look like they were transplanted from Germany or France--except the token church at the town center was replaced with a mosque. In other places I felt like I was driving through the poorest parts of Alabama or southern Georgia. Still other places resembled stereotypical images of African poverty. I mistakenly programmed our GPS to avoid major highways, so we entered Casablanca via back roads framed on either side by vast slums (which were, of course, studded with satellite dishes).
Fes and Marrakech both consisted of old and new regions. The newer parts of each city resembled their European counterparts. In the newer region of Fes, you could visit a different cafe every day for a year. While you drank your coffee you could watch Muslim women in sweatsuits and hijabs jogging, or Westernized youth walking to school. A kilometer away you could enter the gates of the old city and watch history wind back a thousand years. You could spend hours shoving your way through the winding narrow streets of the souq, competing with pushcarts and donkeys laden with crates of Coca Cola. Turn off the main streets--as we did one time--and you will find yourself in a labyrinth of identical alleys and homes populated by staring children. Marrakesh played up its exotic "oriental" side; the snake handlers and trained monkeys made me think of Indiana Jones. When we had our fill of oriental wonders, we slipped inside a modern restaurant to escape the brutal heat and ate banana splits.
I was pleasantly surprised with my language ability. First, it was encouraging when I read billboards and street signs, most of which were written in both Arabic and French. I couldn't read more than a few words of French, but I could read the Arabic almost fluently. The same thing happened with spoken language. It's an encouraging feeling to realize that my Arabic has improved to the point that I can handle it much better than any European language. A highlight of the trip is when a waiter, upon hearing my Arabic accent, asked me, "What is your nationality? Lebanese or Syrian?" It's the first time that someone mistook me for being Arab after I started speaking.
Of course the language has its difficulties as well. The Moroccan dialect is fast, is heavily mixed with French, and is very hard for a foreigner to understand. Although my wife and I could understand enough to survive, we never understood more than ten or twenty percent. On some occasions I had no idea if the other person was speaking French or Arabic. When a parking attendant started talking with me, I stopped him and explained that I do not speak French. "Oui!" he exclaimed (the French word for yes). "I am speaking Arabic!"
I'm spending today recovering from an exhausting week of travel, and trying to catch up on a week's worth of news.
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