It’s just as well that my teacher Abdul is a religious man, otherwise in between vowels and consonants he’d be hearing a helluva lot of expletives – probably the one that starts with F and doesn’t change its form depending on whether it’s spelt out in capitals or joined in cursive.
I achieved 99% for my final university Afrikaans exam and what can I say, once I set my sights on something, I am DRIVEN!
This morning’s lesson begins with an alphabet test and I score 25/28 which is 89.2% – omigosh! In my defence can I just say that the three letters I get wrong are because Abdul has taught them to me incorrectly? Dare I blame him?
The not-quite ninety percent kills me, but Abdul beams and swiftly proceeds to the next lesson – joining the letters into a word. And that’s when it all unravels for me. The J-sounding letter looks like an old English T ج and it requires a lot of concentration to remember which strange shape of each letter denotes which sound. Feeling confident that I can remember the sounds, I open my notebook and grip my pen. However, once the ج is added to other letters in a word it changes shape so as to be unrecognisable. “I have to learn the alphabet all over again,” I say to Abdul and he gives me a blank stare, but when he sees the alarm trembling in my eyes he grabs the notebook and starts writing down the attached form of the letters.
Without waiting for the new instructions to sink in Abdul proceeds with the vowels – fatHah, damma, kasra, jazam, tanween and kasrataini, they are not written as letters, but rather they resemble apostrophes and miniscule backward e’s and o’s. He dots and slashes them above consonants that I no longer recognise because they have only just been taught to me.
By this time the words are swimming in front of my eyes and instead of reaching for a tissue I realise I’m not wearing my glasses so I make my excuses to fetch them. My housekeeper commiserates with me and pats me on the shoulder. Containing my sniffling, and stumbling in my reading glasses I totter back across the lawn to my table of learning.
My housekeeper’s five-year old grand-daughter Kini lives with us and she has left her keyboard on the ground next to the table; I almost eat grass when I trip over it. I mutter under my breath and wonder why I can’t be as linguistically capable as she is. A year ago she couldn’t speak a word of English and now she sounds like a kugel from Glenhazel, so South-Africanly flattened are her nasal vowels. But vowels aside, she has mastered a third language in less than a year (Tswana and Zulu being her other languages); and I know that if I was to test her on the personal pronouns I’ve been teaching her, she’d score more than a miserable 89.2%.
Abdul consults the grammar book in the hope of finding some instruction that will elucidate what he is trying to teach me, but he is unable to locate the neat and meaningful grammar lesson that I need. I say F under my breath and reprimand myself – “You wanted to learn Arabic Isabella, what are you going to do – give up because it’s too hard?” The hell I am!
I grip my pen and grit my teeth, suck in a deep yoga breath. “Let’s try this again Abdul. I am a slow learner.” There – I’ve admitted it; I might not be totally convinced, but it eases the frown on Abdul’s unlined face and it’s infinitely worth the little white lie.
Who am I kidding? Myself, I suppose; but if I believed for one nanosecond that I couldn’t succeed then I’d have to seek out another project, and as I’ve said before, I couldn’t bear to hear another word about the latest trends in HRT.
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