Hot Tip: Studying Actually Helps
Tuesday, March 2
The quiz actually wasn’t horrible! I did save studying for the night before, but I studied a lot. I utilized my Quizlet, and I found it really helpful with vocab. I also had a pretty strong understanding of all the concepts we had looked at throughout the chapter, so that helped cut down on the material I had to focus on.
During the quiz, I was disappointed to see that my knowledge of vocab was helpful, but there wasn’t as much as I was expecting. I did fairly well, though. The quiz consisted of fill-in-the-blank, translation, writing questions and answers, and a verb conjugation. I only guessed on three blanks, and everything else I feel pretty confident about. My professor said that when we turned in our quiz we could leave the Zoom call, so I got out of class about thirty minutes early.
Thursday, March 4
Class was very interesting on Thursday. To start, my professor was five minutes late. We students were in our group chat wondering if we wouldn’t have class due to the 15-minute rule, but as soon as someone said anything, she entered the Zoom call. Also, we girls were the only ones to do the homework! The guys got an earful from our professor for not doing it, and it was kind of funny… until my professor got after all of us for not knowing our new vocabulary from the lesson. One of the guys was quick to jump into the group chat asking if any of us would be down for a vocab study session this coming weekend. I honestly doubt anything will happen, but we’ll see.
Class consisted of going over the homework—which took way too long—and then learning about how to create a plural noun from a singular. There are three different ways to make a noun plural, but we only went over two: the human masculine plural and the broken plural. The human masculine plural is simple: an ending (either ون- or ين-) is attached to the end of the singular noun. However, which ending that is used depends on some complicated context that my professor said we didn’t need to know until Arabic 7! So for now, she said that either ending would be counted as correct for us. The second plural formation we went over was the broken plural. An example of a broken plural in English is man versus men. Something inside of the word is changed to make it plural, rather than adding an ending. We were shown examples, but we weren’t yet given the different patterns that fall under this category.
My professor assigned us some textbook reading and practically begged us to learn our vocab. I could tell that she was very annoyed by us.
Arabic Word of the Week
language / lugha / لغة