Learning Arabic

I had another Arabic lesson today. I meet with my tutor twice a week for an hour and a half each time. These free Arabic lessons are part of my package as a foreign hire here at AUC.
I've never had a particularly hard time with language before. I studied Spanish in school, and it's stuck with me fairly well. I lived in Spain for about a month when I was in high school. The Oklahoma City bombing happened while I was in Madrid, to give you a frame of reference. And when I was in college, I had a roommate whose family was Galician, but she spoke Castilian spanish - the same dialect I'd learned. My other roommate was culturally Portuguese - but genetically Korean, which led to some funny moments in Portuguese restaurants. Viv spoke Spanish too, so every once in awhile we'd watch TV in spanish together, or chat to keep ourselves going.
Over the past few years in Princeton, my Spanish practice was mostly restricted to speaking to illegal warehouse workers who ended up in my ambulance. Practical things, mostly, like "Where does it hurt?" and "No, I won't tell the police." I spent a memorable week in France a few years ago, dutifully attempting to speak French. Apparently I went the entire week without using any verbs - but things seemed to be moving along, and I was pleased with my ability to fumble along in a language after hearing it for a few days.
But these Arabic lessons ... phew.
Arabic has two versions of the letter "A", one of which is made waaaaaay back in the top of the throat. I've had a cold the last few days, and that sound has been torture.
It gets worse, though.
There's more than 1 "z" - but one of the "z"s becomes "th" which ends up "dh." The letter for "th" goes to "t", and one of the two "k" sounds isn't even pronounced. It turns into a glottal stop, which in my mouth comes out as a cross between a burp and a poor imitation of a sound a native Australian would make.
There are "heavy" and "light" consonants of "s," "d," "t."
My true area of disaster, though, is the realm of the "h." There are - I'm not joking here - 4 permutations of what we call "h" in English. As far as I can tell, they're primarily differentiated by how much they hurt my throat to pronounce. It seems that I can't tell much of anything, though, because I can't hear the difference when my tutor pronounces them, and even though I think I'm doing what she's doing, I'm clearly not.
"Oh my God, habibti," Negla says, shaking her head and removing her crooked glasses from her nose. "Oh my God, do you know what you just said?"
Inevitably I've made some hilarious mispronounciation, along the lines of "I am a snake" instead of "I learn." Or curse words instead of "to read." I struggle to make the sound she's making, but I can't hear any difference. Worse, I can't say the sounds differently.
I've learned most of the letters by now. The excitement! I'm learning to read and write! So now when Negla spells out the word I'm supposed to be saying, I can see all the letters. But I still can't make the right damned sounds - for the consonants, any way. Nobody actually writes out any vowels, and I guess this system works if you already know what the words should be.
And don't forget that spoken Arabic in Cairo is completely different from Arabic in other countries, and written Arabic is classical, so it's not even the way I would speak. If I could speak. Coherently.
So I make my way through Cairo, chatting amiably with taxi drivers and waiters, making polite small talk with shopkeepers. I'm so often mistaken for an Egyptian - apparently I have Egyptian "features," whatever that means - that the phrase I use the most is "Please excuse me, but I only speak a little Arabic." I suspect that I leave scattered behind me a breadcrumb trail of linguistic gaffes that are visible from space.
Ah, well, so I'm hilarious. I suppose it's not the first time - but I do feel more than a little silly.