Previous entry: « I would like you to dance |
Me write pretty one day
An update of my ongoing progress in Arabic class:
We are learning spoken greetings and progressing well with learning the written alphabet, and soon we will start putting the letters together into words and changing their shapes as we do so. We are starting with the six "one-way connecting letters", which don't connect to each other at all - they just sit next to each other and don't change shape. As a result, I can now put those letters together in the following exciting words:
راد (house)
داو (valley)
راز (visit)
دود (worms)
Come راز my راد in the داو! I'll cook you up some دود.
(As a side note, it adds a whole other layer of difficulty when I have to translate the Arabic into Unicode!)
srah - Tuesday, 29 August 2006 - 12:17 PM
Tags: arabic, in arabic, language
Comments (14)
Noor - August 29, 2006 - 10:08 PM - ℓ
yes, it is backwards for me, too -- let me know if you ever figure out what the correct browser setting is. I usually have this problem with unicode Arabic.
Yay for learning Arabic! BTW, you can also use bait instead of dar . . . but that might be my Palestinian dialect cropping up! :)
Gary LaPointe - September 2, 2006 - 4:53 PM - ℓ
I have a hard enough time just leaning another language with characters I'm familiar with.
The numbers were tricky enough when I was in Egypt in the spring. (Although don't we call our numbers "arabic numerals"?)
I did think sign language classes were easier than "regular" language classes, but the signs themselves give a bit away...
srah - September 7, 2006 - 6:38 AM - ℓ
Thanks a lot, Arabs!
I think it would confuse people a lot if one day ٥ meant 5 and ٦ meant 6, then the next day they had to use 0s and 7s for completely different numbers. It confuses me enough as it is and I'm taking a college-level language class in it rather than... selling olives in a market or teaching calculus or whatever.
srah - September 7, 2006 - 2:29 PM - ℓ
I had a long talk with my professor about numbers today and the idea of going back to the "Western" numeral set. I'm fine with learning what they're doing now... and if they go back to the "Western" set then so much easier for me!
(I like numbers in Arabic, because they don't get pen all over my hand like letters do! Now I know how lefties feel!)
Noor, you'll have to tell me what you see. Everything looked fine at work, as I remember, but now that I'm at home, the letters are all backwards, so house is "rad" instead of "dar." WTF? Is my browser overcompensating? AAAAH!