Learn Armenian for Travel, Work and Study

The alphabet is the first pleasure of the language. Its thirty-nine letters are written left to right, have upper and lower case, and each stands for one sound, so there is no spelling to learn once the shapes are known — a matter of a week or two, since nothing can be guessed from Latin or Cyrillic. The letters also serve as numerals, and a few marks are unusual: the question mark is a small hook placed over the stressed vowel of the questioned word rather than at the end of the sentence, and the full stop is a colon-like pair of dots. Stress falls on the last syllable of almost every word.

The sounds come in threes. Where English has p and b, Eastern Armenian has a plain p, a breathy p and a b, and the same for t and k; there are two r-sounds, one tapped and one rolled, and a throaty “kh” and “gh” that sit at the back of the mouth. Western Armenian, the standard of the diaspora, has collapsed the threes into twos and swapped some of them round, so that the same written name is Petros in Yerevan and Bedros in Beirut. The two standards share their alphabet and most of their vocabulary, and speakers of each follow the other with a little goodwill.

The grammar is regular and has no gender at all: one word covers he, she and it, and nothing agrees with a noun's sex, because nouns have none. Nouns take seven cases by adding endings, the definite article is a suffix, and verbs in the present are formed with a small helper that moves around the sentence to mark emphasis — “yes haskanum em”, I understand, becomes “chem haskanum”, I don't understand, by attaching the negative to the helper. Armenian borrows freely: Persian gave it much of its older vocabulary, Russian supplies the everyday slang of Armenia, and English arrives through the technology sector.

Address is warm and layered. “Du” is for family, friends and children, “Duk” — written with a capital — for strangers, elders and officials, and “paron” and “tikin”, sir and madam, with a surname in formal settings. What marks Armenian speech above all is “jan”, added after a name or a noun to make it affectionate: “Anna jan”, “mama jan”, and from a shopkeeper, “akhper jan”, brother dear. Learners who use it are forgiven every other mistake.

For an English speaker Armenian is a long language — the US Foreign Service Institute reckons about 1,100 classroom hours before an English speaker works comfortably in it, in the company of Russian and Hindi — and the hours go to vocabulary, which shares almost nothing with English, and to the three-way consonants, which the ear has to be taught to hear. The alphabet is quicker than it looks and is usually solid within a fortnight; the grammar, being regular and genderless, gives few surprises after the first months. The learner's constant decision is which Armenian to learn, since a course in Eastern Armenian leaves a Western-speaking family half understood.

In central Yerevan a visitor manages in English with the young and in Russian with everyone else; signs in the capital are often in Armenian and Latin letters together. Outside the centre, in the regions and in any dealing with an office, a market or an older person, Armenian — or Russian as the fallback — is the language. Yerevan's technology companies and the international organisations work in English; Armenian firms, the public sector, schools and hospitals work in Armenian. Universities teach in Armenian, with some programmes in Russian and English, and foreign students take a preparatory year in the language. In the diaspora, Saturday schools, churches and community centres keep Western Armenian alive from Los Angeles to Marseille.

• A question mark that moves: Armenian puts its question mark, a small curl, over the vowel of the word being asked about: “Du՞ es galis” asks whether it is you who is coming, “du es gali՞s” whether you are coming at all.
• Letters that count: Each letter of the alphabet has a numerical value, so a date carved on a monastery wall is written in letters, and Armenians can still read it.
• Jan: Added to any name or noun, it means “dear” — “Armen jan”, “Yerevan jan”, even “taxi jan” — and Armenians use it dozens of times a day, to strangers included.
• Let me take your pain: “Tsavd tanem” is said to a child, a friend or anyone you are fond of: literally “let me take your pain away”, used as casually as “sweetheart”.
• Petros and Bedros: The same written name, pronounced in Eastern Armenian with a p and in Western with a b: the quickest way to tell which Armenian someone grew up with.
• The thank-you that takes a breath: “Shnorhakalutyun” has five syllables and defeats most visitors, which is why Armenians happily accept the French “merci” — the everyday thank-you across the country.
• Armenia is Hayastan: Armenians call themselves “hay”, their country “Hayastan” and their language “hayeren”; the name “Armenia” is what everyone else has always called them.

Armenian has no graded national exam of the DELE or TORFL kind, and Armenia's visas and residence permits carry no language condition. Citizenship by naturalisation requires a command of Armenian and a knowledge of the constitution, assessed in an interview rather than by a graded exam, and people of Armenian descent and their spouses are exempt from it. What learners use when they need a document is one of three things: the certificates of the Armenian Virtual College, the online school of the Armenian General Benevolent Union, which teaches both standards in levelled courses; a certificate from Yerevan State University's department of Armenian for foreigners, which also runs the preparatory year for degree students; or, in North America, an ACTFL oral proficiency rating, which is available for Armenian and gives a dated level on a recognised scale.

Universities admit foreign students to Armenian-taught degrees after the preparatory year or on the strength of a university certificate at an intermediate level; programmes taught in English or Russian ask for those languages instead. Employers in Armenia rarely name a level and judge Armenian in the interview. With regular classes, most adults read confidently within two months and hold an everyday conversation within a year.

Armenian is a small language with a devoted diaspora, and the diaspora has built the tools: an online dictionary that declines every noun and conjugates every verb, a full online college with courses in both standards, and a public television service whose news is online and clearly spoken. The self-learner needs the alphabet first — a week of writing the letters by hand fixes them — then flashcards with the sound recorded for each word, because the three-way consonants cannot be learned from a transliteration.

A tutor is nearly indispensable in Armenian for one reason: the consonants. No learner hears the difference between the plain, breathy and voiced t until an Armenian says the three in a row and corrects the learner's attempt, and no app grades it. A tutor also settles the Eastern-or-Western question with the learner's actual family or destination in mind, and supplies the register — when “Duk” is a courtesy and when “jan” is expected — that textbooks mention and never teach.