Funny language story

One of my goals while in the Middle East is some greater fluidity/fluency with the Arabic language. Started learning it at 14, and have managed to study in lots of places and at various times ever since. Just not quite gotten there yet.

Arabic and Hebrew are both spoken in this area (both are official languages of Israel; for the Palestinian National Authority its only Arabic). And its well known that the two are really similar languages... alphabets match up nearly exactly, many words have the same syllables and sounds, and they might sound basically the same to non-native-speakers ears.

So last week, I got a rental car in Jerusalem. As I spent my first few minutes in the car, I tried setting up a maps/gps/navigation system. Google maps is alright here (its better in the West Bank, for example); but Waze is by far the most popular and helpful in Israel. What's cool is it actually shares info from driver to driver about traffic, hazards, cops, etc. And despite not being able to see Waze's land map in English (its always in Hebrew), the navigation directions can be changed to lots of languages.

For the first few minutes in the car, then, I'm hearing directions pretty close to words I recognize. "Yemeen" for example, reminds me of "right" (Ben-yemeen, my name's origin, means something close to "son of my right hand" in both languages). Anyway, when I hear yemeen in the navigation of Waze's standard Hebrew settings, I take that to mean that I should get out of the next traffic circle using the road on the right.

But after a few minutes of understanding only part of the directions, I decide to stop at a gas station to change the settings to Arabic. For one, I don't know enough Hebrew. For two, I want even my navigation to be practice in the Arabic language :)

On my phone, I click a few times and find the settings in Waze. And once inside, it tells me that the directions WERE in Arabic! Dang it!

Soooo, back to the drawing board for the Arabic language. Thankfully there are many willing helpers around me 24/7, plus I have a handful of books in my apartment for continuing my Arabic studies (Harry Potter is the most exciting of them).