Learning Arabic at Converse

Portions of this story were written by Sean Flynn of the Spartanburg Herald-Journal

Mirko Hall

A few facts about Arabic:

• It is spoken by more than 300 million people worldwide.
  
• By 2050, Arabic speakers could outnumber those in English.
  
• Because of Islam’s significant impact on western civilization from the seventh and thirteenth centuries, Arabic is a leading language of art, history, literature, music, philosophy, science and theology.
  
• North America imported $66 million and exported $34 million worth of merchandise to and from Arabic-speaking countries in 2005.

Those are sobering facts when you consider that only 10% of US universities even offer Arabic courses. But with the start of the Fall 2007 Term, Converse began offering Spartanburg’s first Arabic course.

Mirko Hall leads the Arabic 101 course three hours each week. He was originally recruited to Converse to instruct German. A native of that country, Mirko (pronounced MEER-koh) immigrated to the US with his mother when he was four-years-old. The two settled in Minnesota. Mirko would later earn his undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degrees in German studies from the University of Minnesota. In 1990, he began a four-year active duty with the US Army as a linguist. “In those days, if you were a linguist in the military, you were either a voice interceptor listening to enemy transmissions or you were an interrogator. When we shipped out after the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, we were told that the language we would study would be decided after completing basic training and taking an aptitude test which was comprised of a fake language to see if we could decode it.”

Hall learned the language in earnest at the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, California. “The residential course was intense to say the least. For 72 weeks, Monday through Friday, eight hours per day, in a classroom of 10 people with instructors. By the end of this ‘basic course’ in modern standard Arabic with a bit of colloquium, we had a very good working proficiency in the language. Half of my enlistment was spent just learning the language.”

Hall then went to school to be an interrogator for nine weeks before being stationed in Germany. “My time as an interrogator was very much pre-Abu Grahib. As an aside, I do feel that what happened at Abu Grahib was an aberration. We were taught to establish a rapport with prisoners…nothing coercive whatsoever.” Hall’s expertise of the language was even put to use by the Kuwaiti government in the mid-1990s when he helped to translate documents from Arabic to English, and vice versa.

The language can be difficult to learn for English speakers, particularly because of its unique alphabet, which has different letters and is written from right to left. But the language also is phonetic, meaning once the writing is grasped, the language can be understood with more ease.

"It's not that Arabic is really difficult but the grammar is different than English for sure, and it's a new script, and has some new sounds (that are) so different than Spanish or French or Italian. So (language experts) reckon it takes four times as long to learn Arabic."

Hall tries to spice up his class by showing some humorous, mainstream uses of Arabic. In class last Tuesday, he discussed Arabic discourses on such topics as the US visit of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the media obsession with Paris Hilton.

"I like to bring a lot from popular culture into it. Everyone is bright, articulate and motivated, so it makes it a lot of fun."