“Please stop. I speak English.”

First posted on the NAFSA blog

With great confidence, I strode purposefully to the counter of the patisserie and said, “Ithnaan al-qahwa min fa…” The young man working behind the counter raised his hands in front of him in a gesture that was both pleading and placating and, with very little trace of accent, said, “Please. Please stop. I speak English.”

Welcome to the first morning of my first day in Lebanon in the summer of 2009. Suddenly I was facing the prospect of having to travel around Lebanon equipped with Arabic skills that were not nearly as good as I had thought.

By the end of my month-long backpacking trip, which also included time in Syria, my spoken Arabic vastly improved from my fateful coffee-ordering experience – in fact, it  improved more in the short time I was in the two countries then it had over the entire 2 ½-year period that I had taken academic language classes.