Summertime in Vermont, and the Sound of Arabic Echoes in the Hills

Thirteen of us gather around the television, watching the news beamed in from an Arabic news station in Qatar. The announcer, clad in a long white tunic, or abaya, and head covering, speaks in rapid-fire Arabic as pictures of Ehud Barak, Israel's prime minister, and President Clinton flash across the screen.

The headlines over, we students scrape together what little we have understood: There is an important meeting, at Camp David -- starting tomorrow? Or maybe it was last week? What would be basic information in English has become a complex puzzle in Arabic.

This daily dousing in Arabic -- and our flailing but sustained efforts to snatch understandable fragments from the torrent -- is one part of a nine-week immersion in the language here at Middlebury College's summer Arabic School, which crams a year's worth of language instruction into a course that's somewhere between boot camp and summer camp.

There are 100 of us in the school, and we come from all over. The majority, including me, are graduate students, aspiring toward degrees in Egyptian music, Andalusian art, or Sunni-Shiite relations. Some are so-called heritage students -- Arab-Americans or Muslims learning the language of their culture or religion. Others are professionals, like a New York Times reporter preparing for a posting in the Middle East.

Our language program is one of eight offered at the summer school, a tradition that began in 1915 with the German School. There are also nine-week summer courses in Chinese, Japanese, and Russian, and six-week courses in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. All of the schools share a major feature: the "language pledge," a promise to speak in the language of instruction as exclusively as possible.

Exceptions are made for activities like visiting the doctor, shopping in town, or doing outside work (including this article). But with Internet access from every computer and telephones in our rooms, it's hard not to be in contact with the outside -- that is, the English-speaking -- world. One student swears that when talking to her parents or her husband on the phone, she speaks first in Arabic, then translates.

On a Saturday, two other students and I take our books to nearby Lake Dunmore for an afternoon of studying. For a break we decide to rent a canoe -- but who will speak to the boatman? We designate one person to speak, using a minimum of words. To our surprise, the wrinkled Vermonter replies: "Is that Arabic you've been speaking?" Maybe we aren't such an oddity after all.

Some students who can't resist speaking English with each other -- usually behind closed doors, but sometimes in the student-center restaurant -- have received an initial warning from the school's director. It's a small campus, and students and teachers live close at hand in one dormitory. A second warning means expulsion.

The goal of the language pledge is obvious. "Arabic is no longer a foreign language you study only during class," says Nabil Abdelfattah, director of the Arabic School. "It becomes your first language."

The success of this philosophy helps explain a strange phenomenon: why students who could otherwise go to Egypt or Morocco come instead to rural Vermont to learn Arabic. An Arab city might be a more authentic place to study Arabic -- but it's also more intimidating. Almost all of the faculty members here are Egyptians, Lebanese, Moroccans, Palestinians, Syrians, Tunisians, or Yemenites. In linguistic jargon they are known as "sympathetic native speakers." A few of us quickly learn what an unsympathetic native speaker is when one student's husband, a native Syrian, visits one weekend. As we try out our carefully constructed sentences -- "How many are the number of residents in the city of Haleb?" -- he can't control his laughter, even for the sake of politeness.

For us, then, Middlebury is a kind of Arabic incubator, a place to make ridiculous mistakes -- like my repeatedly addressing men using the female pronoun -- with a minimum of humiliation.

Our days begin with breakfast in the cafeteria. (Students in each language program eat at separate times or places.) As I wolf down pancakes and strawberries one morning, a professor sitting with us recites a poem by Mohammed Darwish, a Palestinian writer. We learn that Arabic remains suffused not only with religious meaning -- the Koran was revealed in Arabic -- but also with poetry, an art form that preceded the dawn of Islam in the seventh century.

Indeed, the day after the death of Syria's president, we read the banner headline in Egypt's most prominent Arabic-language newspaper, Al Ahram, which said simply: "The President of Syria Hafez al-Assad is in the vastness of God." Not something you're likely to see in The Washington Post.

After breakfast we dash to class, often flipping through flash cards on the way. "Sabhha al-kheer," our professor greets us as we slip into our seats. Good morning. We spend the next five hours in class, with a break for lunch.

Having already studied Arabic for one year at Harvard University, where I am a student at the divinity school, I am placed in a second-year class with 11 other students. We start out with mufradaat, or vocabulary, playing charades and other games to help us memorize the words for "tidiness," "rebelling," and "mule," among many others.

Later comes quwaa'id, or grammar, a subject that makes me wish I knew more about direct objects in my native language. Taufiq Ben Amor, our professor, patiently explains a new concept, and, evidently noting our blank stares, caves in and offers the English equivalent: "Hatha [This is] adverb of purpose." The stares grow blanker. We learn slowly to let go of the shaky handrail of English grammar and plunge into the world of Arabic grammar, which differs from English in significant ways.

For example, Arabic does not use "is" in the present tense, a rule that initially makes translation confusing. I debate whether one sentence should read "My oldest son is president," or "My son has a big head." (The Arabic "ra'iis" is used for both "head" and "president.") After class we disperse for the afternoon, many of us to catch a few hours of sleep. Others head to the soccer field, where the sport is played with competitive fervor against Middlebury's other language schools. As our team struggles valiantly against the Spanish School, we cheer from the sidelines, accompanied by traditional Arabic drums, the tabla and the duf. Although the Spanish School triumphs, we feel that our authentic ululations gave us the linguistic victory.

Speaking with members of other language schools is forbidden, since we have pledged not only to avoid English, but to speak only Arabic. During the two days before we signed the language pledge, I met a student from the Russian School in the bike shop. We spent the rest of the summer smiling expressively at one another and offering salutations in our respective languages.

After the brief recreation, we begin studying, often at the computer center, which also functions as a language lab. Here we can listen to readings and watch videos from our textbooks. A flash-card program drills us on vocabulary. We write essays on an Arabic word-processing program, often while listening to Arabic music, radio stations, or Koranic recitations, all on the Internet.

Weekday evenings are usually consumed with waajibaat, or homework, with an occasional break to watch the news on Al-Jezira, the 24-hour Arabic news station beamed in from Qatar.

On Friday evenings, however, we gather to hear a lecture from a professor flown in for the occasion, and congregate later for an informal haflah, or party, in which students and professors perform Arabic music. They play the 'oud (the forerunner of the lute), the nai' (a flute), and drums while students who belong to an Arabic dancing club show off their latest hip-swinging moves to calls of "Ya-Salaam!" from the audience.

I haven't figured out how to translate that one.