(I gave this speech in Doha, Qatar last month at the Doha International Book Fair while on a panel about interactions between US and Arab cultures. The US was the country of honor at the fair.)

Thank you to His Excellency Ahmed AL KUWARI and to the Director of the National Library Mr. Abdullah Ansari for inviting me to this panel discussion about cultural interactions between the US and the Arab world.

My name is Susanna Zaraysky. I have come to the Doha Book Fair to present two of my books, Language is Music: 64 Fun and Easy Tips to Learn Foreign Languages and Travel Happy, Budget Low. I am from Cupertino, California, home of Apple Computers and I am a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley.

First, I will tell you a bit about myself and why I am here. For many years I could not understand why I was so talented with foreign languages. I speak English, Russian, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Serbo-Croatian. I learned Serbo-Croatian while working in Bosnia after the war. People would come up to me all the time and ask me to translate or interpret for them and I did not understand why they could not communicate for themselves. Frankly, I was totally overwhelmed with the amount of people asking me to communicate for them. It was as though people were yelling all around me in different languages and I was the only one that could understand them. I wanted them to communicate for themselves and not rely on me. I also felt like I saw the world in different ways and had a different personality depending on what language I spoke. Each language was a different way of seeing the world.

Two years ago, I realized my secret: I learned languages as though they were music. I copied sounds just as I would copy a song. That’s why I could reproduce sounds and accents very well and sometimes pass as a native speaker. I learned to have fun with language. When we are babies, we listen for almost a year before we speak. We learn songs and nursery rhymes to learn languages. As adults, language classes are all about grammar and vocabulary and we can easily fall asleep in most language classes because they are so boring. We are studying language the wrong way. Each language has its own rhythm, tone and patterns and when we can copy the music of a language, we can reduce our accents. We should really be thinking of language as music and enjoy the process. To help others learn foreign languages, I wrote my book, Language is Music with tips on how to use music, television, radio, film and the Internet to have fun learning foreign languages.

In addition to being a way to learn foreign languages, I see music as a bridge between our cultures.

Americans are more aware of Arabic culture because of music. The popular Algerian Rai musicians, Cheb Mami and Cheb Khaled, are gaining popularity in the United States and Europe because of their partnerships with English and French language singers. Cheb Mami became known in the US when he performed the song, Desert Rose, with Sting. He has been on concert tours with Sting and has appeared on US television shows. I attended a Cheb Khaled concert in San Francisco where there were thousands of people attending and they weren’t all Arab-Americans. He was performing with Santana, a famous American singer and guitarist.

Music cannot be overlooked as a bridge between cultures. Salsa music in the US has become very popular in recent years and people who enjoy salsa dancing sometimes learn Spanish to travel to Latin American countries for salsa dancing vacations. Popular singers like Mark Antony, Jennifer Lopez, Gloria Estefan, and Ricky Martin sing in both English and Spanish and have introduced English language audiences to some elements of the Spanish language and Latin American culture through their music and videos.

Speaking of Spanish, I have a funny example to share with you. Though this may seem silly, I do know people who have learned Portuguese and Spanish by watching Latin American soap operas. Though these programs are not of high intellectual content, they do serve as a way for people to have fun learning languages. We can’t overlook the role of pop culture and television as an educational tool.

In his opening remarks, His Excellency Al Kuwari spoke of the book fair being a venue for a civilizational dialogue between cultures. Coming from Silicon Valley in the US, I truly see that we are in a new civilizational dialogue because of technological advances and the Internet. We are no longer bound by the geographical distances that separated us previously because people in Arab countries and the United States can communicate via the Internet.

In mid-November this year, Accolade, a female Saudi rock band from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia called put its music on My Space and Facebook, two very popular social networking websites. The young female college students can’t perform their music in Saudi Arabia because of cultural restrictions, but they could put their music on the Internet. Their Facebook and MySpace pages don’t even have their names or photographs and only feature one song that they made in English. Soon after they posted their song, they had fans from all over the Arab world and abroad. About one month after they appeared on the Internet, there was a story about them on the most popular radio news program in the United States, National Public Radio. About 26 million Americans listen to this radio program every day. Accolade has about 1600 My Space friends and 2700 Facebook fans. There have been almost 300,000 people who have visited their profile on MySpace.

This is a small example of how these creative young women are making their voices heard outside of their country and connecting with people worldwide. This is quite amazing considering that we don’t even know their names and can’t see their photos. Those people who like Accolade’s music may do some research to learn more about Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries.

The Internet is an inexpensive way to bridge cultures.

The other speakers, Professor Yassine and Professor Al-Tama spoke about the difficulties of getting high quality Arabic literature translated and distributed in the US. This is definitely a problem because Americans are reading less and less. I even got frustrated with the US publishing system and decided to self-publish because I wanted to control my copyright and reach my readers directly and not wait for someone in a high rise Manhattan building to make a decision about where to place my books. What do these publishing executives know about what people want to read? They work in skyscrapers and can’t even open their windows. They are isolated from reality. That is why I say that we can use the Internet to reach our audiences ourselves. Blogs, social networking sites and personal websites are low-cost ways to reach audiences.
We are in a new civilizational dialogue because we are in a new generation. We can make our own bridges using the Internet and not be blocked by the corporations and doors of the past.

I know a man in San Francisco who studied Arabic as an adult and found it to be quite a difficult language to learn. Since he was a computer programmer, he created, Lingua Step, a free online software program to help English speakers learn Arabic. Now people can go on the Internet and use his product for free to learn Arabic.

There are websites that link conversation partners around the world to learn foreign languages. A person here in Qatar can use Skype, a free Internet telephone program, to speak to someone in the US to practice English and help the American learn Arabic.

Unfortunately, Americans are not as hungry for foreign language education as people are in other countries. But this is changing. I think there is hope. During the Presidential primaries, our President-Elect Barack Obama stated that he thinks that Americans need to learn foreign languages. I hope that he will implement changes to our educational system to make foreign language learning more encouraged. The United States has more and more students studying abroad at both the high school and college level than ever before.

Arabic is becoming more popular to study as Americans are curious about the Arab world. The media has reported that Arabic language instructors are in demand. Because of US visa restrictions, there are not enough Arabic language teachers coming from the Arab world to the US to teach Arabic.

Obviously, people around the world may know more about the United States than we know about the world, but this is also changing. People in the United States are growing to be more interested about Arabic culture. Recently, there was a series of documentaries about the community of seven million Muslims in the US on our public television station, PBS. Where I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, there is a yearly Arabic Film Festival and there are many Arabic restaurants run by the large Palestinian and Lebanese community. I learned a great deal about Arabic cultures from my fellow Palestinian and Lebanese students while I attended college. The US State Department sponsors cultural exchanges between the US and Arab countries. Over the summer, I was in Minnesota, where most of the population is blond haired and blue eyed. Even I looked like a foreigner there. I was surprised to find hummus on the menu at a restaurant in a small town. Arabic food is becoming more and more common all over the country and not just in areas with large Middle Eastern populations.

To highlight the musical links between our cultures, I am pleased to inform you of a series of concerts with Sonora, an American jazz band and popular Qatari oud player, Abdul Aziz Haidos to held here at the book fair between December 29-31.

Thank you again for inviting me to speak on this panel. I am a true believer in the cultural bridges that we can make via language, music and the Internet.

(Susanna Zaraysky writes on issues of being a global citizen. She can be reached at info@susansword.com. Her website is www.susansword.com.)