Mastering Arabic's Nuances No Easy Mission

By Valerie Strauss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 28, 2002; Page A09

Ever since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks exposed a lack of expert Arabic speakers in the U.S. government -- with key intelligence documents collecting dust for lack of translators -- there has been a hue and cry for the U.S. school system to pump out more linguists.

And schools from coast to coast have responded. Colleges and universities are starting courses to meet unprecedented student interest: Middlebury College's famed summer language institute just added space for 30 percent more students in Arabic, and two Montgomery County high schools are offering Arabic.

But experts in the language say that anybody who believes that schools in the United States will be able to fill the gap quickly are deluding themselves. They argue that there are relatively few people in the pipeline, that Arabic is among the most difficult languages to learn and that the college environment isn't ideal for learning it.

"The best way to learn a language is without distraction, which makes most university language programs problematic, because students are probably taking biology, psychology and basket-weaving along with it," said Roger M. Allen, a leading Arabic scholar who is a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

"It becomes just another subject, which is exactly what it is not," he said. "It is a skill, and it takes a lot of practice."

Learning other languages has never been a high priority among Americans. The United States was built by immigrants who, until recently, tried to shed their old languages and accents to melt into their new world, said Kirk Belnap, an Arabic professor at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

World War I left Americans suspicious of anything foreign, and the Supreme Court in the early 1920s overturned laws in 22 states that restricted the teaching of foreign languages. In 1979, a report commissioned by President Jimmy Carter declared that Americans' "incompetence in foreign languages is nothing short of scandalous," and many linguists say that not much has improved since.

Fewer than one in 10 students at American colleges major in foreign languages, according to the National Council of Organizations of Less Commonly Taught Languages. And most of those language majors choose French, German, Italian or Spanish. Only 9 percent learn such languages as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Indonesian, ones that are spoken by the majority of the planet's people.

Foreign languages are not considered a core subject in the United States, unlike in Europe, where people cross borders more frequently. Europeans also start students on languages at an early age and get more practice than Americans.

Lexie Doyle understands about a lack of practice.

She took three years of Spanish in her Fairfax County high school, and she did well. But when she went to college, she realized that she didn't remember much, so she started right back "at zero." After three more semesters and top grades, she was unable "to speak a lick" of Spanish, she said.

Why didn't it stick? Classes were packed -- "you answer every 10th question because there are so many other kids" -- and she would do homework alone, with few people to help her practice speaking.

The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages recommends that an elementary school program include classes three to five days a week for 30 to 40 minutes and that middle schools hold classes daily for 40 to 50 minutes. Few public schools do this, even in the most commonly taught languages, Spanish and French.

"I think government should do whatever it can to promote it, but I don't know how much elementary and high schools can do the job," said John Eisele of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic.

Practice is the key, and immersion -- living in a country where the language is spoken or being in a situation where only that language is spoken -- is the best way of learning, said Dirgham Sbait, a professor at Portland State University in Oregon.

Arabic presents special challenges because of the difference between formal Arabic -- the Modern Standard Arabic that is written and spoken throughout the contemporary Arab world -- and the many dialects spoken in Arab countries.

Among the educated, the language veers toward the written form, so an Iraqi diplomat and a Moroccan professor would be comfortable talking at dinner. But Iraqi and Moroccan peasants would strain to understand each other.

"For an English-speaking kid, that puts a double issue on them," said Dora Johnson, a research associate at the U.S.-funded National Capital Language Resource Center. "Because what happens is they learn to read and write and speak this formal Arabic, but then they hit up somebody to speak with who looks at them and says, 'Where are you from, Mars?' "

Arabic belongs to the Semitic group of languages, which includes Hebrew and Amharic, the main language of Ethiopia. It is grouped with Chinese, Japanese and Korean by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages as the hardest for an English-speaking person to learn. The Arabic script of 28 consonants does not resemble English. Transliteration can be difficult and inexact, which is why different newspapers frequently spell Arabic names differently.

Even with the new interest in the language, there are relatively few people being trained: fewer than 6,000 college students, according to the Modern Language Association's 1998 survey, compared with more than 3.5 million taking Spanish.

Only one university -- Georgetown -- boasts a full-fledged Arabic Department, and it has the largest Arabic enrollment in the country, according to Karin Ryding, its chairman.

Also, a few years of college instruction often isn't enough. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages estimates it takes between 2,400 and 2,760 hours of instruction for someone with a superior aptitude for languages to attain the highest level of achievement in Arabic -- one that would be good enough to be a translator or lawyer.

A typical university course that meets daily offers about 280 hours over two years.

Arabic was originally taught as a "dead" language, like Latin or Greek, but the method changed in the 1960s to concentrate on grammar and reading texts.

In the 1980s, the U.S. government began providing money for programs that stressed proficiency. Guidelines for teaching Arabic emphasized speaking, listening, reading and writing. Those remain the foundation, though government funding dipped in the 1990s. After Sept. 11, millions were added to boost language instruction.

The next era, some linguists and U.S. officials say, is for Americans to look at other languages not merely as a way to learn about another culture or read literature, but also as a tool to conduct financial, diplomatic and intelligence activities. And they must drop the assumption that because English is becoming a world language, they don't have to learn any other.

"In the case of adversaries, when someone is planning to do bad things to the American people and English is not their first language, they will not be using English," the Pentagon's Everette Jordan said at a seminar in January. "We shouldn't expect to hear phrases like, 'The bomb is planted under the bus' in clear, concise English."