In the last six weeks I have started learning Chadian
Arabic! Why?! I hear you ask. The fact of the matter is that not many
Chadians speak French. Only those who’ve
been able to have an education can speak French and unfortunately, not all
children here are able to go to school.
The working language of the hospital, between the staff, is French and
so that is why I went to French language school, in order to improve my French
and enable me to communicate better with my colleagues. I can definitely tell that my French has
improved, compared to when I was here in 2013.
However, my ability to communicate with people at the hospital stops
there, with the staff. I’d say around
90% of the patients who come here don’t speak French but the majority of them
speak Chadian Arabic. Therefore
communicating with them is difficult and when I need to speak with a patient I
have to have one of the Chadian staff translate for me (the staff all speak
French and Chadian Arabic).
In order to be able to interact directly with the patients,
I really want to be able to speak Chadian Arabic.
So six weeks ago, I and two expat friends who also work here
embarked on learning spoken Chadian Arabic.
We’ve not attempted to try and learn Arabic script, that feels one step
too far and to be honest. This is
generally a spoken-language culture as a lot of people are illiterate – because
they’ve not had access to education.
After locating a teacher in town, who came highly
recommended by others, we negotiated the price and the days and times we’d
learn Chadian Arabic. We currently have
two lessons a week, each being two hours long.
We meet for our lessons here on the hospital site, after the three of us
have finished the bulk of our work for the day.
It is challenging learning this language! Aside from the fact that we started learning
it at the hottest time of year and at the end of the working day, it is a
challenge to learn a language through a language that isn’t your first. We learn Chadian Arabic in French. Sometimes my brain gets confused with two
foreign languages milling around in there and my mouth interjects a French word
among the Chadian Arabic I’m speaking – cos, well it’s all foreign language
isn’t it?!
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| A page from our Chadian Arabic textbook |
Chadian Arabic only has three tenses: past, present and
future. Language learners amongst you
will know that that was very happy news to hear! However sentence structure can get a bit
complicated and I now have to get used to being able to say the letter ‘s’ at
the end of a word again, which you never do in French but you do in English. And then there’s money. Arabic uses different figures when it comes
to money, and not just the number that corresponds to the amount being talked
about. So that’s another avenue of
confusion!
All in all it’s going well and I’m enjoying it. The hospital staff think it’s great
(actually, make that word hilarious) that we’re trying to learn Chadian Arabic
and they help us out all the time with practising speaking it. However they often go far beyond the amount
we’ve learned so far and then I get stuck!
All good fun.
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| My friends and I with Abakar, our teacher |
