Men in Markets and Lessons in Language

I don’t want to go, I thought to myself. I was in desperate need of some food items, and I held out for as long as I could. I hated going to the market. I always embarrassed myself whenever I tried to speak Arabic there. The men would smirk at my feeble attempts to form sentences. I don’t want to go. I have half a bag of rice. I can make it last. After debating with myself all morning, I gathered up the courage to walk down to the market and grab what I needed. Okay, Just say the bare minimum. Tell them what you need, and it’ll be over. You know how to say these words. You can do this. I walked up to the men in the market, ready and confident.

I’ve heard so many stories about language learning. There always comes the point when, after months of studying, you finally get to where you have your first conversation without embarrassing mistakes. It instills you with self-assurance, and you believe that you can actually accomplish this difficult task before you. Unfortunately, this is not one of those stories.

The first thing that came out of my mouth was a mistake, and though I quickly corrected myself, I saw them start to laugh. Don’t let them get to you. Keep trying. They asked me a question in return, and I had to ask them to repeat it. They laughed again. They repeated it more slowly and, to my dismay, slightly more insultingly. I simply smiled and answered their question, and after getting what I needed, I returned home.

I would love to tell you my confidence-boosting, language-learning story. I would love to say that I’m getting to the point where I’m not making mistakes and embarrassing myself. But I can’t do that. What I can tell you is that even though these men continue to laugh at me, which sometimes hurts, I will keep trying. I will keep convincing myself to return and speak in this challenging language. Why? Because despite them making fun of me, and despite them talking about me while I’m standing there because they think I can’t understand them, I am not ultimately learning this language for them. I am learning it for my God. He has led me here, and in order to glorify Him by sharing the gospel with people here who don’t know Him, I must learn this language well. So, I will keep studying and fumbling and practicing and listening and blundering, because God’s glory is at stake here, not my own. And the glory of my Savior is not something I am willing to toy with.

Lessons in Language: The Follow-Up

Not long after writing the story above, I was speaking with a local friend of mine in Arabic. As I was talking, she started laughing, even though I didn’t say anything funny. Great, I thought. Even my friends laugh at me. Bracing myself for her answer, I asked, “What’s so funny? What did I say wrong?” She smiled and said, “It’s just really weird to hear you speak Arabic.” Of course it is, I said to myself. I know I probably sound like an idiot. “Why is it weird?” I questioned. I was prepared to hear her reveal all of my mistakes to me. Instead, she looked at me and said, “When you speak English, you sound very American, but when you speak Arabic, you sound Lebanese. Your words are clear, and you say them how we say them. It’s just so strange to hear an American speak Arabic and actually sound like us. I don’t see that a lot.” She had absolutely no idea how badly I needed to hear that. I may not yet have a vast vocabulary. I may speak very slowly. I may correct myself often. But to hear that the words I do know, as few as they may be, are being pronounced correctly and naturally was a timely encouragement. As slow as it is, there is progress. There is improvement. There is hope. So, I guess this turned into my confidence-boosting, language-learning story after all.