Arabic hurts my brain
Most people in Alexandria don't speak English, including my relatives that come to visit. So I sit there and nod my head and smile as my family goes on talking and talking in Arabic. I can understand a lot of it, about 50%, and if I concentrate it goes up more. It's like, I can get the basic gist of whatever is being talked about, some guy doing something with some car, or something to do with the sea, but it's the details that elude me (what that something with the car actually is). The problem for me is that after an hour or so of concentrating my head starts to hurt and I get dead tired. I think it's because I'm actively translating everything that's said, while they're saying it. Enter my theory: when babies learn a language watching the people around them speak they form direct relationships between the words they hear and the visuals they see. In there heads there's no translation going on for mom, it just is. However, as a 22 year old educated man I've developed a thick and coherent first language, and so learning this third (I took french in school) involves a lot of arabic->english preprocessing before I understand what's being said. Now, the other problem I have is that I've reached the point where I can't turn this off, so even if I try to zone out, which is quite easy to do when you have absolutely no idea what's being said, my mind is still actively performing this conversion process. After a few hours of sitting in the same room as my relatives my brain feels like it's going to explode. I console myself by figuring that I'm probably still learning something even when I'm not concentrating.
Here comes the 13 year old cousin, who incidentally has the same name as me. Yesterday he graciously spent a couple of hours teaching me some words here and there. What we did, I think, is something quite novel. We pretty much flipped through the latest Wired magazine and I pointing things out and told him the English name as he told me what they were in Arabic. For basic objects like animals, computers, that kind of thing, this point and shoot process works rather well. And then he tried to get me to know what the word war was in arabic. Except I didn't know he was trying to tell me that at the time. Imagine trying to explain the word war with a vocabulary of a dozen completely unrelated words. Ya, it took us about 10 minutes, but man was it satisfying at the end. My mother who was in the next room and could hear us perfectly, and is fluent in both languages later told me she was laughing her head off like it was a prestaged comedy routine.
