When we think of a mastery of speech in the English language we might think of the delicate craftmanship of a poet or the ruthless clarity of a politician. However, this ignores the fact that many of our best poets willingly experiment with the established forms of the spoken word and it dismisses the truth that most of our many successful politicians long since did away with language that revealed any of their real intentions. Without such lofty careers in mind, the joy of speech is in the way it enables us to connect with those around us – sharing ideas and building understanding. When people consider learning a new language it is often this element, speech, that they are really looking to work towards. We imagine ourselves communicating with others in their mother tongue, effortlessly translating our own thoughts and interpreting theirs. We dream of doing away with the supposed ‘language barrier’.
Despite these wishes, reaching fluency in the spoken form of any language is a significant challenge. The burden of translating in real-time is an immense one, first into your own language as you listen to your speaking partner, the back out of your language as you respond. Difficult at the best of times, when the learned language is Arabic and the original language English the learner must also gain familiarity with a range of new sounds they have never previously used and which their speaking muscles are not equipped to produce. Furthermore, vocabulary takes longer to learn, first due to its lack of similarity with English terms and second due to the issues with transliterating lists of words at the point where a new learner is unable to read the Arabic alphabet. We suffer additionally by not hearing Arabic spoken regularly in our own media. there are very few easy and recognisable templates from which we might approximate the appropriate accent which ensures that a total beginner feels like a total beginner.
Building Skill
That is not to say this is an impossible task. As with any language, if you want to make yourself understood in Arabic, you will. The greatest lesson to learn is that native speakers want to understand you. They will enthusiastically encourage the most clumsy of attempts to speak, excited that you are willing to make the effort.
Speaking is the one linguistic skill that cannot be practised in isolation. It is fundamentally linked to being able to learn vocabulary and linked also to listening as it is taught most effectively through conversational exercises. Choose a dialect you want to learn, study the fundamental vocabulary – those words that will be used in each and every conversation – start speaking without worrying unduly about your tenses and the particularities, work in some of the slang and colloquial words, and you’ll be 90% of the way there. But to get this far, you will need a speaking partner. Someone who can start by helping you with your basic sentence construction, move on to train your conjugations and grammar, and finally round out your accent to help you reach your goals.
In service of that aim building your confidence is key. To build confidence you must find what makes you comfortable. It might be practising the phonetic breakdown of each word on your list of vocabulary again and again in the mirror, sounding out each syllable. It might be recording your own voice and using a passage on your daily routine to rock you to sleep. It might be that you find freedom in the fluidity and precise imprecision of the language as demonstrated best through something such as the iconic and deeply religious call to prayer.
Call to Prayer
in English, the oral tradition has mostly been forgotten. In history classes we might cover it in the origin of the Iliad and the Odyssey or hazily recall that it may have found expression in the medieval bards telling stories of battle and quest. Shamefully, the art has been consigned to the past.
Yet with just as storied a lineage the tradition remains a very present feature of Arab and Islamic culture and one of the purest expressions of the mastery of speech in the Arabic language. This is the adhan, called by the Muezzin and it is an instantly recognisable sound across the world.
The first Muezzin was Bilal ibn Rabah, almost 1,400 years ago, but the art and the profession has continued to reproduce itself in the centuries since – carrying the same call but evolving under each speaker to become a personal signature communicated through the particular rhythm and pitch of each chant. It is a perfect indication of both the consistency of a single message, but abstracted through an enormous variety of speech patterns and one of the most beautiful and inspiring uses of the Arabic language.
The high form of speech is far removed from that which might be heard in modern songs or on television, but all heard together demonstrate the diversity of the language. For the new learner these examples are intended to inspire, rather than overwhelm. For now, start by finding a partner, ask then reply to the most simple of questions and begin your journey to fluency.
