Now wait a second....! :-(

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

Ok so maybe it does appeal to me... what about it? What do pot smokers have to do with it? Who is Che Guevara anyway? Other people get Einstein, I get Che Guevara. Sheesh...

Arabic continues

I see that my Arabic 101 post was deleted, probably by me. Oh well, who wants to hear all my outdated angst anyway? :-) We are getting into the meat of things now, things that I didn't know before, which is really nice. It was good to solidify and standardize what I knew, but much more exciting to learn new grammatical structures!!! The best thing is, I can also transfer this knowledge to Lebanese (with some help). I pulled out another Arabic textbook which is great as a grammar reference, and am filling in some weak points of ours with it.

One of the authors of our textbook has some little video clips online with lectures on Arabic and how it's not really that hard to learn. Well, maybe....... Okay, the verb system is regular- every verb is unpredictable! She steered clear of plurals and the things that really do make the language hard. I'll probably be convinced of how amazingly easy it is to learn after I've known it for 15 years, too. :-) Reminds me of the person who told me that once I learned one Semitic language, the rest would be easy. Yes, it's learning that first one that's the killer!

Anyway, French is also getting more complicated, and my piles of flashcards are growing and growing. It's taken me a while to get into the swing of being in school, and now my timing with flashcards and homework is improving some. The first oral exam was pretty funny- I was delighted that my answers were so concise and to the point; but my grade suffered because I didn't talk enough! No oral exams in Arabic; we do skits instead.

Axis of Evil

I am now the gleeful possessor of several *really cool* books about Arabic. Top find: an English-Arabic dictionary of the Levantine dialect I've been learning for the past couple of years. So much better than asking someone for each word... I even found a reference grammar for the same dialect!!! Dialect heaven (except we are missing the Arabic-English half of the dictionary...).

Another great book is "Using Arabic". This covers the different levels of formality, and how they differ in grammar, vocab, etc. Best of all- the dialect used for all the vocabulary examples is Levantine! Yes!!!!!!

The other day my long-awaited copy of "The Top 1,000 Words for Understanding Media Arabic" arrived. This is a really cool little book. I have wasted a lot of time trying to find words I heard on the radio in the dictionary, with a really low success rate. Yes, I was looking forward to learning words for "journalist", "high-level sources" and "to refute, deny, repudiate", in addition to all the names of organizations. What is the point of listening to Arabic news if you don't even know what their take on terrorists and hostages are, because you don't know the words for them?

Thumbing through in the most geeky way, planning which words to memorize first, I suddenly saw, "Axis of Evil". Goodness. The thought of someone coining an Arabic phrase for this really had me ROTFL!!! I suppose it was necessary. In such an evil world, it's a good thing some of us are still "optimists".

BTW, I can now say, "Elementary, my dear Watson" in Arabic.