القاموس

longtime readers of this site (the one or two of you who don't scratch this place off your reading list every time i do this) will recall that periodically i bitch about my arabic homework. today it's not a bitch. more like a semi-brag. ready or not, here it comes.

i think i have almost gotten to the point where i can call myself barely competent with the arabic-english dictionary. unlike any other language i have studied, you need a lot of knowledge before you even know where to look for a word in the damn thing. the problem is not just learning the order of the alphabet, you need to know a bit about the structure of the language to even know what letter to go to

for example: tonight, for the first time, i came across "yaSfahaa" in a news article i was translating. i found the word under "w" because its root is w-S-f (the "haa" is a suffix, not part of the word)

another example: if you want to find "intafada" (the verb that the noun "intifada" comes from) you have to look under "t" (because the root is t-f-D) and then look for the definition by roman numeral VII. getting the right roman numerals can be really critical--roman numeral II sometimes has almost the opposite meaning of the definition by roman numeral I (e.g. "darasa" (form I)= to study, "darrasa" (form II) = to teach)

and so after reaching the equivalent of a third year arabic student, i have now gotten to the point where i can find a word in the dictionary on the first try about 80% of the time. yay me.

in other news, i figured out how to write in arabic script in blogger. arabic milestones are dropping like flies today

thus ends another boring arabic language post (hey, i spend all this time puzzling over my homework, i got to get this crap out of my system now and then)