I Am Arabic’d Out for the Week
Monday, April 5
The extra review session went well. We started on a new grammar concept called iDaafa, which consists of two or more nouns and creates a relationship of possession between them. An English equivalent would be “a book of Lex” or “Lex’s book.” As someone who is an English major and who has had years of grammar drilled into her, I found this concept interesting and almost fun.
An iDaafa consists only of nouns. The first noun in the phrase must be indefinite, and it is more than likely the object or concept to be had. For example, “book” would be infinite in the phrase “a book of Lex.” The second noun is definite and is more than likely the haver of the object or concept. A word can be definite or made definite in three different ways. First, a proper noun is definite. “Lex” is already definite because it’s a proper noun. Second, the article “the” can be added to the beginning of the second word in the prefix form of “-ال”. And third, a possessive suffix can be added to the end of the word to make it definite. Below are three examples showcasing each scenario.
1) a book of Lex | كيتاب ليكي
2) a notebook of the student | دقتر الطالب
3) the family of my father | عائلة والدي
I think my favorite thing about learning a new language is seeing how the grammar works. Grammar vastly differs from language to language, and I find it fascinating to compare the grammar of English to the grammar of Arabic to the grammar of Latin (the language I took in high school). Now if only I could just remember everything…
Tuesday, April 6
We started class by going over the homework—which was like pulling teeth—and then doing an exercise where we had to pull out all the iDaafas that we saw. I am such a grammar nerd, because I really enjoyed the exercise. And I find that if I’m not pressed for time, my reading abilities get so much better and I can actually understand what I’m reading aloud.
After doing some reading, my professor went over this chart in our textbook that compares two Arab universities and what colleges and departments they offer. This was to show how iDaafas are used in the Arabic language. Then, we students were to form a sentence with our name, major, and college it falls under.
Lex studies English and Political Science in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Hofstra University.
ليكس تدرس الإنجليزية والعلوم السياسية في كلية الفنون في جميلة هوفسترا.
My professor ended class by announcing a vocab quiz on Thursday. Let’s see if she goes through with it.
Thursday, April 8
Again, we went over the iDaafa construct again. I didn’t mind, since it helps reinforce it in my mind. The exercises took awhile, so by the time we got to a drill in our textbook, we only had about thirty minutes left of class.
The drill was a listening exercise that requires you to fill in the blanks. If I were to do the drill on my own, it’d take me an hour. In class, it took us twenty minutes.
Finally, my professor assigned us homework and said that the vocab quiz is moved to next Tuesday. Oh, what joy.
And in other news, I got a 15/20 on my last quiz! She is allowing us to do quiz corrections so we can earn back a few points. I’m grateful that she’s allowing us to do that.
After three Arabic classes this week, I’m beat. It’ll be nice to have a break over the weekend.
Arabic Word of the Week
history / alttarikh / التاريخ