Verbs, Verbs, Verbs!

Tuesday, November 16

I don’t know why but class has been so chill lately. It doesn’t stress me out as much, and my professor is more open to conversation veering off into a random topic before pulling us back to the material we’re going over in class. The past few classes, we’ve talked about Thanksgiving and what our plans are and who’s cooking, and what we’ll be having for dinner. 

Once we got past talking about Thanksgiving, we started Lesson 8. After going over the new vocabulary, I realized that this chapter is fairly short. It covers the past verb tense—how to conjugate in the past—and reviews the Arabic dictionary again. My professor then told us that she wants us to create a verb conjugation book, where we conjugate all the verbs we’ve had so far in the present and past. Here’s what an entry for one verb would look like:

The first table gives me all the information I need to conjugate the verb: the three letter root, the verb pattern, the past and present tenses in the 3rd person masculine form, and the gerund. 

The second table is the actual conjugation of the verb “to eat.” Is it a lot? Yes. And that’s not even the entire verb! My conjugation pages are going to be many. Maybe I’ll do them over Thanksgiving break. 

Thursday, November 18

Today was pretty much like any other day of Arabic. We went over our homework. It involved reading out loud a lot, and I didn’t feel as embarrassed as I normally do! This one word that I had trouble pronouncing kept following me around, and I kept laughing and apologizing to my professor over my pronunciation. I didn’t feel like a failure, but rather a student learning a very difficult language. 

After going over the homework, we did this exercise involving the dictionary. I don’t know what it is, but I love doing any and all exercises that deal with the Arabic dictionary. It feels like a Where’s Waldo game in trying to find the word I’m looking for, since the Arabic dictionary is alphabetized by the roots and not the actual word. 

We moved onto filling out a mock application to a university in Saudi Arabia. I finally realized how my last name is spelled in Arabic: بيسكر. And to end the class, we were assigned a lot of homework. But I’m really going to try to pace myself rather than wait until the last minute. We’ll see how it goes. 

Tuesday, November 23

Well, you can add today to the list of weird Arabic classes I’ve had so far this semester. Class was on Zoom since Thanksgiving Break is later this week. At the beginning, I was the only one on Zoom. And my professor started class like she normally did. I really thought that if I was the only one who was going to come to class, that she would just cancel. If only 1 student out of 5 shows up, I feel like class is obsolete. However, soon two other guys joined, and we were missing two other students. 

Class was painful. I was one of two people who did the homework, and I was even ahead on homework since I was trying to get ahead so I wouldn’t have to do a lot of Arabic homework over the break. Needless to say, my professor was not happy with the class as a whole. 

As far as the class itinerary went, we did comprehension drills, which I hate with a passion. The first was answering questions from a video, and the second was reading two paragraphs (which I did horribly) and answering questions my professor asked us. And then we looked up various grammar concepts within the paragraph, which wasn’t awful. 

Overall, I am glad that we have a break this week, and that we only have two weeks of classes and one week of finals left in the semester. 

Arabic Word of the Week

the world / alealam / العالم