In the summer of 2006, when the war with Iraq was raging, and Israel was at war with Lebanon, I accepted a position as an English Language Fellow and moved my family to Damascus. Forthcoming is a memoir of that miraculous year, during which Bashar al Assad was still asserting his power, and the Arab Spring, with its dashed hopes and brutal crackdown was still years away.
The title of this page is based on one of my favorite errors. Arabic has different sound and spelling systems than English. P and B are phonemes–it’s a difference we perceive, but Arabic doesn’t; thus, I once had an Arabic student who wrote that English was a Pig Broplem for him. It was, and is. The reverse is also true. English does not have certain sounds (or doesn’t have them any longer), such as the “GH” in the above spelling of Baghdad, بغداد, for example: (the second to the last symbol, reading from right to left). I have never mastered the pronunciation of that sound, and sound very silly trying. As a consequence, words that people attempt to spell with English letters sometimes miss the mark, hence, we have been delighted to find buses that were supposed to read “Happy Journeys,” spelled, Happy Gurneys, Happy Jerneys, Haby Travel, and Happy Juorneys.
My delight is not meant as ridicule. My attempts at speaking other languages are clumsy at best, and many times they’re so bad the listener doesn’t even know that I’m trying to speak in their language. I don’t know what I don’t know, but I keep trying. My attempts to write Arabic look like a kindergartner’s and my Devanagari (the script of Nepali and Hindi) is even worse. If I try to engage someone in a conversation, I not only have to produce words in the right order but understand what the other party is saying, and that’s taxing in the extreme. Most of the time, I stick to what I know, such as “Is this taxi free?” or “How much is this?” or “What time is it?” I’m not afraid to make mistakes, but unless it’s a real emergency, that’s what I limit myself to, and I have to rely on the good will of the listener to get my point across.
Once, in Nepal, my little hot plate malfunctioned and I had no idea how to fix it. My landlord was away. I found a young man who came into my home, replaced a teeny tiny part in less than five minutes and then charged me 3000 rupees. It was an outrage! That was $30,when the average taxi ride was $3, and my rent was $300! I refused to pay that, he refused to budge on his price, apparently thinking I was a rich, stupid American. I stalked next door to the tailor’s and the butcher’s. I had acquired enough Nepali to cobble together reasonably comprehensible sentences to tell them quite vociferously that I was being cheated. “Reasonably comprehensible” probably came out something like this: “My hot [stove, in English] not go. Boy he come. Small small [showing with my thumb and forefinger how large the part was.] Boy say give R3000! I say no! Boy say yes. You say no to boy.” A heated argument ensued, that I understood most of, to my great satisfaction. My landlord showed up and the young man was forced to accept what my defenders thought was reasonable, which I was happy to pay. I was vindicated. My Nepali may not have been perfect, or even moderately grammatical, but I did get my point across. However, without the help of my neighbors, who thoroughly enjoyed this entire incident, I would have been alone and at the mercy of an angry young man who was in my kitchen.
So, no, I would never ridicule someone’s imperfect English. They are always operating at the farthest reaches of their knowledge.
My colleague Carol and I were sent to Syria to conduct Teacher training. The method were obliged to use was what is termed “cascade training,” in which an expert conducts trainings, which are then taught to others, which is taught to others, and so on down the line until all are trained in certain methods. Sounds great in theory, but filled with pitfalls. In reality, this is like playing “telephone.” every iteration is less well — or more realistically– much more poorly– communicated to the subsequent generations, until in the final analysis, it’s practically meaningless. Unfortunately, I’ve seen it over and over and over again in my career. I believe that failure is baked into this method, unless intense follow-up and coaching come along with it, which did not happen in Syria, for a variety of reasons, the most important being that due to the deteriorating relations between our two countries, the contract was not renewed, then the war started, and life generally fell apart for the dedicated teachers we worked with.
About four years later, I was invited to conduct a session at a conference in Heyderabad, India. I chose to present on the pitfalls of Cascade Training. I will try to somehow post the powerpoint here. As an aside, what interested me most about making that presentation was how many indians came up to me afterwards to marvel at how I was willing to admit in Public that we had made mistakes. This does not happen in South Asia. It is customary to attack a presentation. A friend from Karnataka told me that he completed his PhD coursework and wrote his dissertation, but never defended it for the simple reason that he could not face the thought of personal and professional annihilation that undoubtedly awaited him at his defense.