After a disappointing four year degree in Arabic, it was only in an immersion course that Fred McConnell discovered the magic of language learning.
‘The intensity started to work its magic. I was getting full marks on assignments and regularly staying up past midnight to prep for classes.’ Photograph: Alamy.
I did not choose Arabic for an undergraduate course because I loved learning languages. All that mattered to me was travel and adventure, and in that regard my degree was highly successful. But I loathed all forms of academic work and was under the delusion that academics could somehow transmit Arabic over the course of four years via exposure and mental trickery.
By the end of my degree, I came no where near close to fluency. Yet, the fact I never memorised a thing or opened my mouth in class didn’t seem to bother anyone. I kept up just enough to pass and avoided having to overcome my terror of saying something incorrect.
I suspect I’m describing an experience familiar to many undergraduate linguists: the lose-lose bargain of being trapped in a torpid classroom for a few hours a week, in return for remaining anonymous and feeling no pressure to exert more than minimal effort. In order to actually acquire language in such circumstances, it helps to be ruthlessly driven, have a photographic memory and lack all social inhibition.
In the end, I scraped a 2:1. I muttered roughly four complete sentences in my final oral exam and, overall, found the academic side of university almost traumatising. I was saved by solid grades in theology and history courses taught in English.
Two years after graduating, I knew that what little Arabic I had was quickly disappearing. But rather than let it go, I found my more mature self finally wanting to conquer it. Knowing that traditional classrooms and I will never mix, I opted for the uniquely rigorous American system of short-term immersion. To my knowledge nothing similar exists elsewhere, not even in the Middle East. At least, not for civvies.
I saved and borrowed all I could before flying to San Francisco in July 2012, where I would stay on a leafy, Oakland campus and pledge to communicate exclusively in Arabic for two months.
There are many like it, but this particular summer school is delivered by Middlebury College, based in Vermont. The college has even trademarked its language pledge, which dates back its first immersive German course in 1915.
On the second day, several hundred students – some absolute beginners, others studying at master’s level – crammed into a dark wood-panelled hall to recite the pledge. It fulfilled all my Secret History fantasies and felt closer to being at boarding school than a language course for adults.
After a week of sickening nerves and an almost non-stop headache, I began to loosen up and develop intense camaraderie with my nine classmates (mostly Americans and one Afghan) and even with our two motherly teachers; one Egyptian, one Syrian.
The student body as a whole included academics, NGO workers, journalists, military specialists, plenty of eccentrics and one soon-to-be ambassador. Most students’ fees were covered by their colleges or jobs, while the rest felt committed enough to attend out of their own pockets. We were a mixed bunch but were united by the objectively bizarre nature of our predicament; voluntarily banned from communicating in our shared mother tongue.
We spent up to five hours a day, five days per week studying (which mostly meant speaking) modern Arabic. Afternoon clubs were mandatory and included Middle Eastern cookery, a campus newspaper and Qur’an recitation. Each evening, four hours of prep was standard and tutors were on-hand for advice into the small hours. Several nights a week there would also be a talk on art or politics, or a hammy Egyptian movie to watch. Every meal was communal, which meant students, dozens of teachers (all but one a native speaker) and, in several cases, their families.
So, unlike at university and in the increasingly English-speaking Middle East, I could not avoid practising Arabic and my self-consciousness melted away. I no longer cared about perfect sentence construction or a slow pace of conversation. All that mattered – literally, since it was the only way I could communicate – was that I was understood.
Practically speaking, things occasionally drifted into absurdity. Alongside Arabic, Japanese and Spanish programmes ran concurrently, since the campus was large enough for language-specific dorm halls. But when groups of us passed on the quads, a hush fell, accompanied by territorial side-eying.
On our first weekend off, four of us reasoned that we could attend San Francisco Pride as long as we communicated exclusively with each other and exclusively in Arabic. So we did, more or less, and school field trips don’t get much better.
Slowly but surely, the intensity started to work its magic. I say magic because, for the first time in 25 years I’d gone from excuse-making coaster to insatiable nerd. I was getting full marks on assignments and regularly staying up past midnight to prep for the next day’s classes.
I finished the summer with among the highest grades at advanced intermediate level. I couldn’t quite debate at the UN but I could speak, read and write Arabic and be understood by most useful measures. I was on the verge of beginning to think and, yes, even dream in a foreign language.
Despite not using it daily since then, such was the quality of this education that I still have access to most of it, embedded deep in my brain. I also have a sense that the unrelenting mental gymnastics of that summer have left me a relatively stronger all-round linguist and logical thinker.
It may seem indulgent, but if you can save up the fees, a summer school like this is cheaper than university, even if you do it more than once. Plenty of colleges offer similar schemes with subtle but important differences in method.
And if saving up takes a while, so much the better. I felt more motivated than my undergrad friends at Middlebury because I knew by then what real life in a slow economy felt like. Arabic wasn’t simply the degree I was doing by default because I’d left school, it was a marketable skill.
It may not be the obvious choice but full immersion remains easily one of the most enjoyable, rewarding and interesting things I’ve ever done. I don’t regret university – I developed there in other ways – but given the choice again, I’d take a couple of summers in immersion, combine it with travel in the Middle East, and forget the undergraduate course altogether.
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