Three years ago I headed off to Lebanon for 6 weeks with grand plans of studying the beautiful Arabic language. After minoring in Japanese in college and studying in Tokyo for 5 months, I had no delusions of language grandeur. I knew I wasn’t going to leave Lebanon with a full grasp of the language. But I thought I’d at least be able to read a kids book, chat with the taxi drivers and restaurant waitstaff or shop my way around the country.  Ha!  I can blame it on my contentious relationship with my Arabic teacher (I wanted to like him but his teaching style did not work with me) or the fact that nearly everyone I needed to speak to spoke English as well as I did. But the true issue was the endless list of distractions in Beirut that kept me from studying. Distractions that made sitting in a classroom for 4 hours a day (plus nightly homework assignments) less than appealing.  Either way I left the country knowing little more Arabic than I did when I arrived.

So I was very pleasantly surprised with how many words and phrases still laid dormant in my mind three years later. After spending 2 weeks with Arabic speaking friends from Egypt, Lebanon and the UAE during my most recent trip to the Middle East, those words started to come back to life. I realized I had learned more than I thought. Sometimes it was a word or phrase. Other times it was a speech pattern or intonation that would never work in American English, but sounded fairly normal in Lebanon where English, French and Arabic are thrown together as if they were one language.  Because I love languages so much, I find a little bit of joy every time a word comes back to me. In the middle of the street my brain would suddenly throw out the Arabic word for “chicken” or “door”. Luckily it was an internal conversation – imagine the looks I would have gotten shouthing “CHICKEN!” in the middle of the street. It is like putting a puzzle together. A phrase would just pop into my head. I’d often have to ask what it meant, but the words were still there.

Here are a few of my favorite words, known by nearly everyone who’s spent more than a few days around an Arabic speaker:

Khallas = enough, stop, finish

Yallah = Go, let’s go

Bahs used where an English speaker would use ‘but’

Faah is used as a filler instead of ummm

YAHNni = like or um

FadeLEH = go ahead

I also started to recall some of the Arabic letters and if I managed to sound a word out, I felt like a little kid who had won a spelling bee.  I had to laugh at myself. Another small victory is that I still remember the Arabic numbers from 0 to 10 (written and spoken).  When I was in a car I’d often pass the time reciting license plate numbers in my head into Arabic to test the quickness of my recall skills.

I have always loved languages … even when I barely understand them.  Tell me, are there any languages you’re working on learning? Are you taking classes, using an app or living abroad with hopes of absorbing the local language?