A shortcut to ignorance

In my constant search for ways to stimulate my linguistic needs, I recently got my hands on a copy of the book titled Arabic for dummies by Moroccan author Amine Bouchentouf.

It’s a handy and fairly pedagogic guide to learning the basics of what is known as Modern Standard Arabic. It’s my intention to post a later entry discussing my experience with this book once I’ve read it all the way through and, hopefully, have acquired some degree of understanding of this interesting and important language. However, at the moment I will focus on one issue that caught my attention while reading the opening chapters.

As the title suggests, this book is very much intended for laymen with no previous knowledge of Arabic or linguistics in general. The author makes an effort to carefully explain even basic concepts such as nouns, adjectives and definite/indefinite article, while filling the margin with icons identifying paragraphs as cultural wisdom or grammatically speaking.

A quick glance at the table of contents confirms that this book is indeed aiming to teach the reader how to make basic small talk and get by in an Arabic speaking country or region – only one chapter is devoted to grammar, while other chapters have titles like ‘as-salaamu alaykum!: Greetings and Introductions, This Is Delicious! Eating In and Dining Out and Ten Favorite Arabic Expressions. The structure is similar to a school text-book with chapters focusing on specific everyday situations and presenting various phrases and key words useful in these contexts.

As Bouchentouf is/was living in New York City, the book is clearly written with an American (English speaking) audience in mind. The first chapter is titled You Already Know a Little Arabic, and starts with a short list of words that are similar in both English and Arabic, due to loans and influencing in both directions. This section is obviously intended to spark an interest for the Arabic language, and to make it seem relevant to the average American. While this list really adds nothing to the book except for a fun facts value, the uninterested can simply skip past the section and move on to the introduction of Arabic letters and pronunciation.

However, this is where the targeting of (American) English speakers becomes a real problem. Bouchentouf introduces the consonants and vowels of the Arabic language along with concise pointers on pronunciation, such as sounds like the “d” in dog or sounds like the “f” in Frank. This strategy becomes more troublesome when it comes to sounds that have no direct equivalent in English, and the author uses sounds from other languages such as like the Spanish “r”, rolled really fast or sounds a lot like “Bach” in German or “Baruch” in Hebrew. These descriptions require some previous knowledge of other foreign languages.

Even bigger problems arise with sounds peculiar to Arabic, or at least uncommon in other large language groups. For example, try to work out the pronunciation from this description: No equivalent in English; imagine the sound you make when you want to blow on your reading glasses to clean them; the soft, raspy sound that comes out is the letter. Now the reader is required to have bad eyesight?

It really is an admirable attempt to explain these exotic sounds to an American audience using simple, non-technical terms, but such an approach unavoidably has its drawbacks. Certain sounds may be uncommon and only appear in very few languages, and it’s important to understand that sounds not learned in the early childhood can be difficult to produce later in life, even with practice. Furthermore, all second language learners should be aware that nuances in the pronuncation of foreign languages can be almost impossible to spot if such distinctions are not used in one’s native tongue.

This issue has previously bothered me when trying to explain the pronunciation of Swedish words and sounds to native English speakers. More importantly, I encountered the same problem while studying the Chinese language at university. Some Chinese sounds appear exotic to speakers of both Swedish and English. In the common pinyin method of romanization, these sounds are represented by letters or letter combinations such as x, sh, q, ch, z, c etc. The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) symbols used to represent these sounds are, in the same order, as follows: [ɕ], [ʂ], [tɕʰ], [tʂʰ], [ts], [tsʰ]. If these symbols do little or nothing to help you, rest assured that you are far from alone.

I will not discuss the actual pronunciation of these sounds any further in this entry, since it is irrelevant to the topic. My point is that second language learners are rarely expected to have mastered the IPA phonetic symbols beforehand, and that they are unlikely to do so unless given extensive education on the subject of articulation. Since such education would be a side-step from the actual language learning, and would require a certain amount of time allotted to subjects other than the second language as such, teachers often use shortcuts to the pronunciation of exotic sounds, hoping that these will be more comprehensible to students.

The obvious problem with this method is that the more familiar explanations of unfamiliar sounds may be too arbitrary to actually be helpful. My Chinese teachers used the common Swedish sj sound as an approximate to the Chinese sh, and in order to produce the Chinese x I was instructed to move the place of articulation toward the teeth. Since the students in my group came from many different parts of the country, they also brought different dialects to the classroom, and with different dialects comes different pronunciations of even those sounds most common to the language. The various methods used by the students to produce the sj sound could be described, in more technical terms, as denti-alveolar, alveolar, palato-alveolar etc.

In Swedish, these different points of articulation when producing this particular sound are all accepted as allophones of the same phoneme. What this means is that they are seen as variations to one basic speech sound, so that varying the pronunciation in this manner makes no difference to the meaning of the word, or to the meaning of the sound itself. It would seem justified, then, to ask which one of these allophones best approximates the Chinese target sound, and indeed if any of the allophones are adequate for this purpose. The question becomes even more problematic when we consider some of the sketchier descriptions used by Bouchentouf. It seems unlikely that all people produce the same sound when cleaning their reading glasses, and thus we need to know which version of this sound best approximates the Arabic target sound.

Let’s not forget that the IPA is there for a reason. In fact, in second language learning an objective, non-ambiguous description of unfamiliar speech sounds is absolutely indispensable. Referring to speech sounds in the native tongue of the learner as approximations of sounds in the second language is problematic for two major reasons. First, as I have discussed above, there is rarely, if ever, one absolute standard for the pronunciation of any sound in any language, which raises the obvious question of which one of the naturally occuring variations is supposedly similar to the target sound.

But perhaps more importantly, this method leaves second language learners largely in the dark about finer nuances of pronunciation. What is implied is that you will never understand this distinction, so don’t even bother trying. Considering the fact that second language learners make the effort to learn a whole new language, it is my opinion that teachers could be expected to teach that same language without taking shortcuts.