'Scientific shopping'...!

Anis Albasha

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the mall with my son to buy new slippers for him. I did not expect that our trip would be also a good opportunity to have a science-fun time for both of us! Educational researchers assure that 'science starts at home'. While that's absolutely true, science can also be found in fun places like the commercial center in the city where I live.

It was one of the cold days of February, as the famous song says, when my son and I went to the Mall in order to look for new slippers , Hausschuhe' in German, for him. I already knew that buying any kind of shoes for my son is not going to be an easy task because he belongs to the 5-7- age group. Since this group covers a wide range of children, this size is quickly sold out. Therefore, we left home early in the morning and I was prepared to spend a long strenuous day moving from one shop to another. I even took a book and some snacks with me!

Once we entered the mall, we saw that certain areas of its concourse were occupied with different sets of objects and tools. In fact, we used to see different small exhibits in this mall where different themes are displayed depending on the season. For instance, when the autumn arrives, we see different kinds of crops placed in scattered miniature farms in the hall. In Christmas time, the hall would be filled with Christmas decorations, trees, etc.  But on that day, the purpose of those wooden and metal installations in the hall wasn't obvious to me, so I told my son: “why don't we go and find out about that?”, and that was the beginning of the 'scientific fun' we both had.

I found out that the main theme of the exhibit was 'the senses'. The purpose of all the installations in the hall was to help children finding out by themselves about that concept through different kind of games and activities.  Next to each set, there were instructions in both English and German explaining the purpose of the game or the activity and how it works.

In the first modular exhibit I saw a banner stand with a photo and a short biography of the German carpenter, pedagogue and artist Hugo Kükelhaus. According to the Wikipedia, 'Kükelhaus (1900-1984), is regarded as a harbinger for infant toy designs that fulfill the requirements of developmental psychology. He gained international recognition for his design of 30 "Experience stations" at the German Pavilion of the Expo 1967 in Montreal. His ideas are relevant for contemporary theories of intelligence, educational technology educational and the design of learning environments'.    

 My son and I started to check the installations one after another. For example, in one exhibit there are different kind of materials such as rocks, woods and wool placed in a number of boxes and children can touch the contents of each box with their bare hands so they can get the different feeling of each texture.

Moreover, there was in another sector a big metal cylinder for steam rings in which 
children can watch how the string rings move and how far they come. 

My son was so excited by all the games and the activities. I have read once that young children are more engaged with things they can see, touch, manipulate and modify. This concept was obvious to me when I watched my son moving from one set to another trying to figure out the purpose of each one.

Among all the activities, what sparked my son's interest, and mine too, was the optical trick of the invisible body or what is called the 'Head on a platter'; a person goes under a glass table placed in a booth and people who stand outside the booth can only see his head which protrudes from a hole in the middle of the table while the rest of his body magically disappear!

 He was fascinated by that trick in particular though he tried all the activities more than once. But he would always came back to that one and tried it over and over. He even asked me to go under the table and he tried to take a photo of me while doing so but the photo was blurry because of his laughter when he saw my head coming out of the table.

While playing with my son, I was really impressed by the efforts that have been exerted to make that exhibit. I’ve noticed how everything was simple yet attractive enough to captivate kids' attention and motivate them.

  It wasn't until much later when I had realized that we didn't buy the thing we came to the mall for, the slippers! Even though, my son was very excited earlier about getting new slippers, he totally forgot about them and wanted to continue trying those scientific activities.

Ultimately, we, parents,  play a crucial role to prepare our children for a world vastly different from the one in which we grew up. However, it may be difficult for many parents to introduce science to their children through attractive activities and that's why parents should avail every opportunity that could help them in this area.That is why I’m so grateful to the clever idea of mixing shopping with learning and science with fun in a way that helps children create a growing understanding of the value of science in early age. Surely, it begins at home, but one might learn about science even when he is on his way to get new slippers!

Waiting for the camels!

Rasha Almaqaleh                                                                                                            

Like many people around the world, I enjoy watching American movies and series. I admire how the directors pay so much attention to the details and how they turn a fiction into something that feels almost real. However, whenever they shoot a scene ‘supposedly’ in an Arabic country or depict the Arabian culture in their films or series, their idea about the everyday life in the Arab World seems naive and unrealistic.  It is obvious that their references are not accurate or they are seriously outdated.

Let’s take the third episode of season 7 of ‘the mentalist’ as an example. For the record, I like Patrick Jane so much. He is quite a character and I was sad to see him in that episode looking like a fool!

In that episode, Jane and Lisbon go to Beirut to gather information about an international supplier of weapons and explosives; Jan Nemic, a Slovakian national who is trained by the “Russian mob” and the CIA thinks he is involved in an imminent terrorist operation against the U.S.A.

  It is important to mention that the filming locations of the episode are in the U.S. and the footage from Beirut was provided by a freelance photographer.

Anyway, when Jane and Lisbon arrive in Beirut, strange and irritating background music is played. That music is played in every scene in Beirut as a special effect which apparently aims to make the viewers get a ‘real’ feel of the Arabic ambiance. Even though I’m an Arab and I grew up with the Arabic music and my ears are very well tuned to it, that background music feels so weird to me. It is something I’m not familiar with, probably because it is ‘ancient’ and perhaps it is taken from the old ‘Arabian nights’.

I’m not really sure because I had never heard it before. One thing is for sure though: the Arabic music has significantly changed since then and that background music is kind of irrelevant.  It makes you think that a semi- naked female dancer is going to jump up at any moment to do some belly dancing.

In addition to the odd out-of-date music, here come the decorations of the hotel where Jane and Lisbon stick around during their stay in Beirut. The hotel is hypothetically located in downtown Beirut, yet the interior decoration seems as part of a Caliph's Palace back in the seventh century. The arabesques are excessively scattered all over the walls, there are old lanterns in the hotel’s lobby, and Eastern carpet runners are laid along all the stairs.

When Jane lies on the palatial bed, surrounded by all the arabesques, I felt like he is the Caliph, if only the Caliph wore a suit and used a Smartphone.

Moreover, when Jane and Lisbon arrive in their room, Erica serves tea in an old Arabic style in which the tea is poured from a traditional Arabian tea pot called Dallah, and served in small cups. I cannot imagine that modern hotels or households still use that classical style of serving tea anymore or at least very often. It is probably still used in Arabic desert tents by tribesmen. When I watched that scene, I felt like Jane, Lisbon and Erica are sitting in a Bedouin tent in the desert, not in a modern hotel downtown Beirut.

Another funny thing is when Lisbon asks Erica “do you speak Lebanese”? That question seems so weird to me because there is no such a thing in the Arab world as the Lebanese language. Although, we have a variety of dialects in the different Arabic countries, we never call them ‘languages’ and we never ask a question such as “do you speak Yemeni or Lebanese?” Instead, we refer to the different dialects by saying: “They speak Arabic with a Yemeni accent or a Lebanese accent’ and so on.

Furthermore, in that episode, one side of Beirut is showed and it is not the tourist side, of course. The scenes were mainly filmed in crowded dirty wet streets and poor neighborhoods. When you look down, you can see weeds on the grounds and when you look up, you find cables crossing over each other between old buildings. Even though, that side does exist in Beirut, the tourist side is huge and part of the real deal, too.  

Another unrealistic thing is the apartment where the Slovakian smuggler lives in. It is an old apartment filled with antiques! The sofa, the coffee table, the small desk and chairs are so old that it gives you the feeling of being in a museum, not in an apartment.

One of the things that I really enjoyed is the way they pronounce the word Manakeesh. It is so cute and funny. It was obvious that there was no Arabic consultant among the crew at all!

Another proof of the absence of Arabic guidance, the scene of the police catching the Slovakian criminal. It is normal at the beginning, but not until someone decides, all of a sudden and with no reason, to shout the Arabic words “ya habibi”! These words basically mean ‘my love’ and it is used in different contexts depending on the situation, but I can’t see that scene as one of them!

And to finalize the Arabic touch in that episode, the final scene on the rooftop has to be about celebrating ‘the end of Ramadan’ with fireworks. Cool thing, right? Yeah, why not?! But ironically, on of the first scenes in Beirut includes people eating and drinking during the daytime. There is also another scene for guys smoking on the street. So how could it be possibly Ramadan while locals are not fasting?!

Overall, when Americans film something about the Arab World, it seems that they desperately seek something extremely bizarre and hugely different to the modern life they are familiar with. I understand that and I appreciate their search for authenticity and originality and I admit that there are indeed huge cultural differences between East and West. But, thanks to globalization, I guess that Americans sometimes are looking for things that do not exist anymore. And if they want to shoot something about the everyday life of Arabs, they should at least avoid coming up with scenes that make viewers feel that a camel might jump up from the screen.

Hello...Hallo...Ciao!

Rasha Almaqaleh 

I’ve always been fascinated by languages for language is, as Edward Murrow once said, “the memory of man.”  That’s why I find learning a new language interesting and much fun. But, it could be challenging and tricky at the same time. Especially if the language to be learned has difficult sounds and complicated grammatical rules.

 When I started learning English, I couldn’t help but comparing it to my mother tongue, Arabic. I would spend so much time figuring out the differences and similarities in the sentence structure, sounds of letters, articles, noun genders, etc.  But, when we learn more than one or two second languages, comparisons become much more fun!

  I learned English a long while ago and it was my ‘first’ second language. I loved learning it since I was in school and I’ve always planned to master it. Ironically, I got higher grades on English than on Arabic! I think that’s because the Arabic language is more complex and difficult comparing to English.

The first thing I noticed when I started my journey with English was that the Arabic alphabet consists of 28 letters while the English alphabet has 26 letters. I started searching for the sounds that Arabic has and English does not. The variety of the sounds in Arabic is stunning. Take a look at the table below to see the Arabic alphabet and the corresponding letters in English. 

Before living in Italy, I used to think of English as a universal language and a great way of communicating with the whole world regardless of its differences. However,  my faith in the English language and the whole ‘dreamy’ concept of communicating with the world crashed in Italy! There, my English was pointless and not much of a help. That is because most of the Italian people don’t speak English at all. English to them is very difficult to speak and hard to understand. As a result, I had to learn some Italian to be able to communicate with my surroundings.

Honestly speaking before arriving in Italy, I hadn’t known a thing about the Italian language, not even a single word. In my early days there, I remember hearing the word “Si” so much and I was wondering what that word meant and why Italians use it so much. And when I started learning Italian, I found out that ‘Si’ simply means Yes! Wow, I really had zero knowledge of Italian and it was then when I realized that I would struggle learning it.

I started listening to people when they spoke and I found that the sound of Italian was so different from English. That was interesting because I realized that I was comparing Italian to English and not to Arabic. I think that’s because English is a second language to me and Italian, too.

But, when I learned how the verbs are conjugated in Italian and how we could use the verbs without the need to mention the pronoun for it is already indicated in the verb, I started comparing it to Arabic.

Italian is indeed musical and Italians talk SO MUCH! When I knew that the Italian alphabet consists only of 21 letters unlike English which has 26 letters, I wondered how they do all that talk with only 21 letters. Well, actually with 20 letters! The letter H in Italian is pronounced just as the letter a, as in apple. That’s why it’s so difficult for Italians to say a basic English sentence such as: ‘I have’! Instead, they pronounce it like this : “I ave!" 

When I moved to Germany and started to learn German, the first thing I noticed was how different the German language is from Italian and how close it is to English, well, close to some extent. For example, when I hear Germans say: “Das ist gut!”  I think they say: “This is good!” The similarity is stunning. We say hello in English and hallo in German! Moreover, some words in German are used in the same sense as in English.

For example, the word ‘book’ in English which means ‘printed work’ could be used as a verb to, to book, in this case it means ‘to make a reservation. In German it is just the same with the word ‘buch’ which means book and the word ‘buchen’ which means to book.

Furthermore, the phrase ‘so far, so good’ which is widely used in English has a similar German equivalent : ‘so weit, so gut’. The word weit means exactly far. There is an ongoing debate over whether this phrase is just a translation of the English one or is it a genuine German phrase. However, what really matters to me is how similar the usage of words and context is.

 But, when it comes to the gender of nouns, German gets so complicated, more complicated than Arabic! In Arabic, we have two noun genders: feminine and masculine. In German, there is a third category which is ‘neuter’. And this is something I’m really struggling to make sense of. Neuter describes a word that is neither feminine nor masculine. For example, the word ‘kind’ which means kid or child, is neuter. It doesn’t matter if the kid is a boy or a girl, the word itself is not either!

And with the three different genders come the three different articles. While in English there is only one definite article ‘the’ and two indefinite articles a/an(depending on the first letter of the word), there are three definite articles in German: der, die and das, and ‘theoretically’ there are two indefinite articles ,ein and eine. However, when ‘cases’ are considered, the indefinite articles madly multiply: einen, eines, einer, einem, and eines! 

There are four cases in German: nominative, dative, accusative, and genitive. Those
four cases in German are what made me appreciate the simplicity of the English language.

Unlike English and Italian, all nouns in German are capitalized which means that each and every single noun must be written with a capital letter. This is one strict rule that our teachers would never tolerate violating! And now, by force of habit, when I write in English, I find myself eagerly capitalizing all nouns! Then, I realize that I’m not writing in German and the ‘decapitalizing’ process starts right away. Learning languages could really mess up your head!

One of the many things that surprised me about German is the way the letter R is pronounced! In some regions of Germany, especially in the north where we live, the letter R is trilled, similar to the French R. This was quite confusing at the beginning but with time I got used to trill all the Rs. Actually, I have no problem with the sound of the trilled R because in Arabic we have a letter with a similar sound. Therefore, we, Arabs, can trill and 'gargle' with no trouble. However, I still cannot accept the way my name, Rasha, is pronounced in German! I don’t like the sound of it but I have to answer, anyway!

And even though the sound of the trilled R is a piece of cake to me, there are other complex sounds that I’m still struggling with, such as pronouncing the following letters which are called ‘umlaute’ : ü, ö, and  ä. I am still not satisfied of the way I pronounce words such as: Übung and Löffel.

Moreover, there is a special pronunciation of the syllables 'ech' and 'ich' and pronouncing the words that have one of these syllables, or sometimes both!, is such a struggle. I always don't feel good about uttering the following words ‘ich’, ‘shclecht’, ‘schrecklich’ and a bunch of other words. I always ask Germans when they pronounce such words about the location of their tongues. It’s indeed a strange and difficult sound for me.

 ‘Doch!’ This is one of my favorite words in German. I like this word because we have similar words in both standard Arabic and also dialect. Even though this word is often translated in English into a variety of words such as but, but still, and yes, none of these translations are really accurate or satisfactory. As a matter of fact, there is no equivalent word in English for doch.  So, what is the meaning of this word and in what context is it used?

I will try to explain this word with an example because I don’t think there is any other way.

A mom and her child are in a supermarket and then the child sees a toy and say to his mom:
Child:  “Mama, ich will dieses Spielzeug!”   (Mom, I want this toy!)

Mom: “Nein!”      (No!”)

Child: “Doch!”   (“It’s a yes even if you say no!”)

So doch in the previous context is not just a plain yes. It is a yes to someone who says no. That’s why you will find this word very popular among kids here and actually my son always uses it with almost every single no we say to him!

Ultimately, I enjoy doing such comparisons while learning and I find learning languages this way more fun and culturally enlightening. Or as Rita Mae Brown put it ocne: “Language is the road map of a culture.”