We Were on a Break!
What Did I Do Over Winter Break?
A new year, a new semester of learning Arabic. A glorious eight weeks of winter break have passed, and now we’re back to the usual grind. I didn’t do much to keep up with my Arabic studies over break. While I had grand plans, I knew deep-down that I wouldn’t stick with them. However, I did stick with my Duolingo. There were a few times that I missed a day, but I’m proud that I didn’t let myself fall into an Arabic-less hole over break. I also redid all of my Quizlet flashcards. Hopefully I will have a better handle on my vocabulary this semester.
I also want to let you know that this past November I applied for a study abroad program that is fully funded by the U.S. government. However, I did not make it past the first round of applicants. If you would like to read more about this and where I think my future is going, you can click here.
Tuesday, February 2
WOW, after eight weeks of no Arabic class, my professor threw us back into the textbook and covered one and a half chapters with no review! To say I feel disoriented would be an understatement. We started by learning the Arabic equivalent to the English “the.” Instead of it being a separate word, the prefix -ال [sounds like “al”] is added to the beginning of the word. This is pure phonetics, it is not a grammar issue. It sounds simple, right? Wrong. When speaking, the “l” is not pronounced, depending on the following letter. It’s explained that there are “moon” letters and “sun” letters. Moon letters (such as ف and م) pronounce the full “al-” prefix. To simply say “office,” one would say مكتب [maktab], but to say “the office,” one would say المكتب [al-maktab]. Meanwhile, for sun letters (such as ت and س), the full prefix is written, but the “l” is silent and only an “a-” prefix is said. To say “time,” someone would say زمن [zamin], but to say “the time,” they would say الزمن [a-zamin]. It’s confusing, but it must be learned. One mnemonic device that my professor gave us is that for the sun letters, the sun melts the “l” and is not pronounced.
I know I talked about Arabic word roots sometime last semester, but we dug into it more this week. For homework, we were given ten words and some clues to figure out what the three letter roots were. Because you see, the Arabic dictionary is sorted by the roots of the words. All the words tied to a certain root all surround the same meaning. For example, we were given the word امتحان. From there, after a bit of trial and error, I figured out that the root was م–ح–ن. I used this root to find the full word in the Arabic-to-English dictionary. (If you want to check it out, you can click here.) Finally after some scouring, I found the definition for امتحان, and it means “exam.” Using the Arabic dictionary is fun, once you get the hang of it. I hope we use it more in the future.
Thursday, February 4
We started class by going over our homework of Arabic roots and using the dictionary. I did pretty well! (But I may have had a little help from Google Translate… oops!)
After we reviewed our homework, we went over several new spelling and grammar rules. One of them is called alif maqSuura. This occurs when the long vowel alif comes at the end of a word. Instead of writing the alif as ا, it is written as ى. My professor said there is really no rhyme or reason to it. We also learned another form of alif called the dagger alif. (It’s called something different in Arabic, but to make things easier and more badass, I’ll just refer to it as the dagger alif.) Instead of the regular alif letter being used, an apostrophe-like symbol is used. An example can be found in the word for “however”: ولـٰكن. That apostrophe-looking symbol has the same sound as a long vowel alif. It’s used very rarely, and it represents old spellings from the Qu’ran.
There were more grammatical structures we discussed, but quite frankly, this blog post is long enough. Let’s just say that I am thoroughly confused and am praying to the heavens that I can retain some of this information.
Our homework for this weekend is to write one paragraph describing a picture from our textbook. We also have to write another paragraph introducing ourselves. And then next week, we start on a new textbook: Al-Kitaab [The Book]. I found a bootleg PDF of the textbook online but the quality is so bad I don’t know if I can stand it. I may just suck it up and buy the physical textbook, since I learn best that way. Oh well, we’ll see what happens.
Arabic Word of the Week
story / qisa / قصّة