Babel

"What country are you from?" Shakib asked the boy behind the counter.

"Pakistan," came the reply.

"Do you speak Urdu?"

"Yes."

And that was the last word that Jon and I understood. As we waited in line at school for his ASB photo to be taken, we watched in awe as Shakib and Uzair, a student council officer, gabbed excitedly in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan.

Shakib has been in the US for 6 1/2 weeks now. When he arrived, we knew that he was multilingual, but we did not know the extent of his abilities.

It turns out that he is conversant in at least 8 languages. Besides Urdu, Shakib speaks the 2 official languages of Afghanistan - Dari and Pashto, the language of the Pashtun, his tribe; Hindi and Punjabi - Indian languages; Farsi - the Persian language spoken widely in Iran; Arabic - the language of the Qur'an; and English.

I have read enough to know that this is unusual for an Afghan - most of whom speak one, two, maybe three languages - so last night over dinner I asked Shakib how he had come to speak so many idioms. It turns out that, with the exception of English, which he studied formally, Arabic, which is read in the Mosque, and Dari, which is spoken in his home, he is pretty much self-taught.

He said that from a very young age - 3 or 4 - he was fascinated with the many languages that he heard around him - especially on the television and often tuned in to language-learning broadcasts on the education channel and followed along. As he grew older, he deliberately sought out people in his neighborhood who spoke other languages and attempted to converse with them. In Shakib they found an apt and enthusiastic pupil. In Kabul, where his satellite hookup receives 3500 stations, he watched movies and television shows in a variety of languages so as to improve his listening skills.

His aptitude is clearly enhanced and driven by his interest in people and his authentic desire to connect and communicate. During the month that he lived in Punjab, India, he was able to converse very well in Hindi and Punjabi and was often called upon by the other students to translate. He glows warmly when sharing about the relationships that he created with the local merchants and townspeople there.

Here in the US, when meeting friends of ours from Iran, he effortlessly switches to Farsi.

As for English, he studied in a private English language class for 3 years. In Central Asian languages, books are written from right to left and read from back to front so he had to reorient himself directionally in order to read and write. Mastering English also required learning a whole new script -- our alphabet, punctuation, numeric characters, and mathematical signs.

He told us that to sharpen his receptive language abilities in the months before he traveled to the US, he listened nightly to recordings of American dialogs.

So how good is his English? He gets along very well in conversation. Occasionally, he becomes frustrated because he does not know a word. However, in daily conversation most of the misunderstandings between us are due to pronunciation errors.

Of course, he has huge gaps in his vocabulary, but he is building it daily. Why just yesterday he asked me what the English word was for people who eat other people.

In his English immersion reading class he is zooming through the Accelerated Reading books he checks out from the library. He says that the other kids don't read during reading time but he does. He is competitive and enjoys being a star student. (Aha, he IS my long-lost Afghan son!)

Shakib is here to learn, and I expect him to improve rapidly. His first STAR Reading Exam score was 2.4 (2nd grade, 4th month). That means that Mom gets to work with him on his reading. 

Dual oral reading is recommended so that he gets practice and direct input as well as the opportunity to follow along with a good role model. A former bilingual educator, I am far more adept at teaching reading than algebra - which we are also working on - but that's another blog topic. Meanwhile, I can't wait to see how far he progresses by his next reading exam.

Want to experience just how different English is from his native Dari? Go to Dari: A dozen simple words for the linguistically challenged and see how you do.

As for Shakib, I don't think we have a comprehensive list of his linguistic accomplishments yet. 

I just discovered that for a few years he lived in a neighborhood with a lot of Turkic inhabitants. Turks reside in northern, central and western Asia, Mongolia, southern Siberia, northwestern China, and parts of eastern Europe. Those he knew came to Afghanistan from Uzbekistan. Shakib spent a lot of time with the Uzbeki Turks and picked up their language along the way.

I'll add that language to my list...

...as soon as I learn how to spell it.