كلمة اليوم

my arabic studies have basically stopped in the past two years. first i stopped before leaving for kazakhstan and then when that adventure was finally over and noz jr. was in da house, i haven't had time for classes or tutoring. but i still have all these arabic apps on my phone, one of them is this free arabic-english-arabic dictionary. the app has a "word of the day" feature. i turned it on a few weeks ago. so now every morning, i get an alert with a random word in english and its translation in arabic. even if i don't have time to study arabic full time anymore, i surely have time to review a single word each day.

in practice however, the service has turned out to be completely useless. the word of the day really is a random word plucked from the dictionary. english and arabic have a lot of words. you can be completely conversational, or even fluent, without knowing a large portion of the entries in a dictionary. at least 75% of the time the word of the day is something that i can't imagine ever actually using.

take today, for example. today's word of the day is "bistoury" (yes, that's the english word, which is مبضع in arabic in case you're curious). what the fuck is a "bistoury"?!?! i had to google the english word to find out. so i'm thinking of turning off the word of the day alert. which means the last remnants of the arabic project will finally die.