fun pre-Socratics lecture

That was fun. And it almost never fails: students like the pre-Socratics. I had their attention the entire time, and there were a number of good questions afterward.

These were students in the English Language Institute, which is part of the University and which is needed given that we are located in a country where the native language is not the one in which we teach. Their English is pretty good already, but these students are those who didn’t quite pass the language proficiency exam at the level needed for immediate enrollment in normal university classes. So they take a semester or two or three to polish their English before starting the normal course of study.

Lectures like the one I gave today take place about four times per semester, and are designed to sharpen the students’ comprehension and question-posing skills in English. I don’t normally see our students at this stage, so it was interesting to see them this early. By the time they get to my Intro classes, 98% of them are completely at ease in English.

And some are astoundingly fluent– in many cases they are better in English than in Arabic, surprisingly enough. In fact, Arabic is one of the most frightening core classes for many of our students. The natives all speak perfect colloquial Egyptian Arabic, but that’s a far cry from classical Arabic, which some of them really struggle to master.

Egyptian Arabic is much easier. The grammar is simpler, and most of the difficult phonemes are absent. The “dj” sound in classical Arabic becomes a hard “g” in Egyptian, meaning that only in Egyptian can I say my first name the right way; in classical Arabic it would be something like “Djaraham.” (Sometimes I just ask them to call me “Karim,” which is close enough.)

The other thing about Egyptian Arabic is that it has a silent Q which is not silent in classical Arabic. There’s a Cairo neighborhood called Doqqi, and when here you have to learn to call it “Do’i,” sort of like how “bottle” becomes “bo’l” in some dialects of English. The only exceptions I know of are Quran and al-Qahira (Cairo), which I guess are words too important for the Q to be made silent.

Most other Arabic speakers can understand the Egyptian dialect, because it’s the language of Arabic cinema. The reverse is not true: my Egyptian students tell me they can’t remotely understand Moroccans or Algerians.