Jamie's got a gun...

As you know, we have been studying Arabic full time. We thought we would give you an example of what life is like as a full time language student. First of all, our days are filled with laughing at each other, frustration, confusion, and small moments of breakthrough. Every once in a while we feel that glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe we will begin to speak arabic well and be able to fully share our hearts. If you know anything about Arabic, you know that there is the Formal language, FusHa (like the mean hyenas in Madagascar), and there is the spoken language which is different in every region, every country, sometimes every city, and sometimes every neighborhood and religious community within the city. Needless to say, there are no fixed grammer rules for anything but FusHa, making it difficult to learn spoken arabic. As we have been on this journey, we have made a few huge mistakes in our pronunciation, in our sentence structure, in everything.

Last week, we were doing our conversation homework which consists of us going around our neighborhood and asking people different questions in Arabic. Jamie, feeling very confident that day, walked into a small store up the street to speak with the very nice woman who works there. Jamie smiled, gave her the normal back and forth greetings, then said to her, "I have homework, can I practice with you?" She immediately made this weird, panicked face, raised her eyebrows (which is the Lebanese signal for no), and said "la, la, la.", or no, no, no in arabic. Jamie, really confused, asked again, not knowing what went wrong...same reaction. The exact same thing happened to John at a pharmacy down the street. We got our homework done, but had no idea why everyone was so freaked out by us. People usually love when foreigners try to speak their language. When our teacher came to our apartment for class, we asked him, "Why does everyone act weird when we tell them we have homework and need to practice with them?" He started cracking up laughing at us and said, "No, you are saying it wrong!". Come to find out that the arabic word for "gun" is "Fared" and the word for homework is "Farad", and the verb "to practice" is the same as the verb "to train"...SO basically we were walking into stores and saying to people, "Hi, I have a gun, can I train on you?" Yikes!!!