As a person fascinated by languages, Lebanon was a perfect location to visit. I had assumed that I would spend most of the time lost in a heady haze of beautiful Arabic peppered by occasional lyrical French phrases to satisfy the Western visitors. I actually like being in that state of mind at times. Where you find yourself trying to understand a conversation in a language you have absolutely no background in as if you have any chance on picking up the basic meaning. Its a weird brain reflex to always try and make sense of what you are hearing. Sometimes you get lucky from gestures and contextual clues and guess correctly at what’s going on. Other times you end up laughing to yourself because the lovely song you thought was about romance was actually about going to the bathroom (true story).

To my surprise, there was nearly an even mix of Arabic, French and English in Lebanon. In Beirut, I’d even say that French was a distant third among the conversations I caught in the street and the billboards I saw along the main roads. Wow! I was in luck. I could understand much of what was going on by hearing the English, but still enjoy the foreign sounds and expressions of French and Arabic. The best part of it was that most of your Beiruti citizens spoke all three languages…in the same sentence. Fantastic! That also helped a novice to the language because they would say the same thing in all three languages at the same time. “Shukran. Thank you. Merci.” Awesome – I just got an unexpected language lesson.

But if mixing three languages isn’t enough, they also have to try and trip me up by throwing numbers in the middle of a word. If I saw an Arabic sentence written out in Roman characters, inevitably there was a “7” or a “3” somewhere in the word. The first time I saw that I assumed it was a typo, but then when I saw it written on a friend’s t-shirt, I had to assume there was some purpose behind it. Apparently, if a number is used to spell out a word, it is because the number looks like the Arabic character it replaces. OK! Arabic, French, English and Numbers! Got it!

One night during my trip, we went out to a fundraiser to support the citizens of Gaza. There were a number of different performers on stage for the fundraiser. Rap artists, Rock bands, DJ’s and one woman who, with the sound of her voice, gave me the final shove to start studying Arabic. She managed to silence a room full of drinking and social people with an acapella version of a song I am not sure I’ll ever hear again. But her voice was so gorgeous and her passion for the words so strong that it gave me goosebumps even though I had no idea what she was saying. When she finished her two songs, you could have heard a pin drop in that packed basement club. And then the applause rolled in.

Of course Arabic is a fantastically difficult language to learn. Not just the sounds and the writing are different from my native English, but the language itself differs greatly from one country to the next. Egyptian Arabic? Lebanese Arabic? Moroccan Arabic? All pronounced differently and from what I understand, often unintelligible from one country to the next. Still that’s not going to stop me…I am going to find a class here in LA and jump in with both feet. (Note: If I write it here it means I’ll do it…I don’t want to lie on my own blog). It won’t be easy, but that’s not a good enough reason to not do something. And if I can go back to Lebanon next year with even a couple of good phrases, and understand the meaning behind a few song lyrics, I’ll be ahead of where I was this year. A little progress is better than none at all.