Listening sessions with Hassan

Since this is the last week of class for level 5, yesterday we had our last day of listening with our listening teacher, Hassan. He meets with us 4 hours a week and we have discussions and listen to texts and such. In general it is for many students their least favorite part of the week and will conveniently come to class at 11 if we have him in the morning. I didn’t like him at first but then I realized what bothered me about him was that he speaks like the religious preachers on the TV and radio (which I hear every morning on the bus on my way to school). I don’t know if this is because he personally emulates them, or this is what he associates fus’ha with or what else, but once I recognized this assocation I got over it and I enjoyed the class discussions and some of the cultural nuances that it is possible to glean from them.

They can sometimes be very painful because the discussions are framed in black and white terms and usually directed towards a certain resolution; we discussed things like: The Internet, good or bad? Today’s Youth with too much Free Time. Drug Addiction, why? Immigration and the Brain Drain, good or bad? The function of Dance in a society. Relationships between men and women: what kinds and what do they look like? (This led to an interesting question of whether it was better to have multiple wives and be faithful to all of them or have only one but multiple girlfriends. Polygamy is not accepted in cities but is not uncommon in the countryside and therefore is considered (by some) an unfortunate but inevitable part of the culture.)

One particularly awkward moment was during one of our first sessions about the origin of the alphabet (apparently originated in a coastal town in Syria) and we were discussing the development of written language from hieroglyphics to characters to distinct letters/alphabet. We were all a little confused what he meant by the Arabic term for characters and he tried to explain by writing something resembling Chinese or Japanese on the board, but of course he didn’t know any of it so instead he pointed to the one Asian student in the room, Wan Jin from Korea, and asked him to demonstrate for the class. Besides being incredibly awkward and embarrassing for Wan Jin to be singled out, it was also fruitless because Korean language is possibly closer to Turkic languages than it is to the languages of the Far East (we talked about this in class a little and I just fact-checked it on Wikipedia, uncensored by the gov't in just the past week!).