lower intermediate

When you keep listening to something for long enough, even without paying too much attention, it will get to you, anchor itself in your brain and become incorporated in your mental spectrum. You learn without effort. It's called immersion – and it's something I can't see working for me.

I need rules, structure and order. If there's no table explaining how things go or a list enumerating all the cases and exceptions, I consider myself lost without even trying. And yet, despite my convictions, sometimes things have their own way of going.

About half a year ago, I was sitting in the lobby of a cheap but friendly hotel in Palmyra, enjoying steaming pots of tea on the house before heading out to the sand and the ruins. The two kids that ran the operation had greeted us with words of warm welcome and a picture book of local sights. They showed us photos of a temple, the colonnaded main avenue and the castle rising behind the excavations. One picture, rather non-sequitur on a fiery September day, showed the site blanketed in snow.

It was at this point that I remembered the first of many lines of dialog from the hours of Arabicpod that I've been listening to, leisurely and with a floating consciousness. Hal sayatee thalj, I could have asked, will there be snow, and the question would have been grammatically correct and oddly fitting in light of the image I was beholding.

Saying a correct sentence in a foreign language is a dangerous thing to do. It gives the impression of knowing the language and impels the other party to drown you in an torrent of excited response. I've experienced this most dramatically at a friend's wedding near Milan when I presented myself to the bridegroom in one short but accent-free sentence, practiced for hours before. He was delighted to meet me, hugged me enthusiastically and told me about his life, how he had fought hard to win his wife-to-be's heart and how blessed he was to have succeeded. A 500-page romantic novel was emptied over my unreceptive ears, in two minutes and in Italian. It took me half an hour to set the record straight. I don't speak Italian.

To avoid a similar fate in Syria, I didn't inquire about the weather. In any case, the burning sun in the blanched sky unambiguously predicted the days ahead and the only response I knew, from the same podcast, was as inappropriate as the question. Faqat matah, only rain.

Since that day, this sentence has been in my head, popping up in complete futility from time to time. Only today was I in a position to make use of it. I was sitting in my Arabic class, surrounded by a curious crowd of rambunctious students. There was the Indian fellow in love with languages, an Iranian woman able to guess many Arabic words because of her knowledge of Farsi but blissfully unaware of the concept of grammar, and a couple of English girls who had spent their formative years resisting the traditions of their immigrants fathers and have now come to regret it. The teacher, a gregarious Egyptian, was dashing through nearly forty pages of the textbook, briefly introducing concepts, new verb forms, compound pronouns, and broken plurals. It was enough to make a Bedouin weep.

The reason for the haste was time, which was running out. Tonight was the last class of the semester, and our teacher wanted to hand us something (no, make that a lot) to think about before sending us off with our certificate of language proficiency at the lower intermediate level. At the end of the two hours, right before the farewell sweets were served and everyone started to speak in the hushed tones of unbearable loss, the talk turned to the seasons and the weather and it was here that I could shine because the sun didn't. There was only rain.