Category: Arabic

OK, just had my last class until the end of Eid. That means no class until Oct. 12th or so. Woot! I did do something that I can’t believe though, I made the recommendation that I take an exam when I get back. With any luck that will motivate me to study, at least after I get back from Greece… I want to take their placement exam that they give to incoming students just to see where I am. There is a program with distinct levels here, but many of the longer term students here don’t stick to it. I’m one of them, but I’d like to have some idea about where I am in the grand scheme of things. I’m not worrying about that right now, I’m getting ready for Greece! I’m leaving in a couple of days and there’s a bunch of stuff I need to do. MMMM, Im looking forward to some good eating while I’m there…

Our new housemate came yesterday. I wondered if we were going to get our “required” German student. We have always (with a small gap) had at least one German here since I’ve been here. Simon is from Austria, I’d say that’s close enough. Anyway, he showed up and needed to eat. He doesn’t know a lick of Arabic so he depended on me for everything. He’s a lot like I was when I first got here. To him, I’m as fluent as a native speaker even though I know all too well my limitations with this language. Anyway, I took him to eat and talked to the waiter and got our food with no problem.

We both stayed out late last night (more about that later) but he went with Henry and the girls to the Russian club and I went to Luchiano’s house. He woke up quite late and missed his driver from work. He borrowed my phone to call in. I could hear him say, “No, don’t send a driver, it’s my fault, I’ll just take a cab…” I didn’t have time to ask him how he was “Just” going to take a cab when he can’t talk to any of the drivers or negotiate a fare. I got dressed and walked him down to a waiting cab. I asked the driver if he knew the university on the street that Simon was given over the phone. The cabbie responded that there wasn’t one on that street. I had no idea where Simon wanted to go, so I was strictly a translator. We figured out that Simon had been given some bad information. Eventually, I thought I knew where he wanted to go, but since he didn’t speak any Arabic, had no phone, and had no Yemeni money, I told him that he’d better call for a driver. If the cabbie and I were wrong, God only knows where he’d end up and God only knows how he’d get back.

It was a bit of a hassle this morning, but it did allow me to realize how far I’ve come with my Arabic. I had no trouble with anything really. I still miss some words, and there are plenty that I still don’t know but I have come a long way. I feel much better about my Arabic skills, and my potential for learning the more advanced stuff as well. It just takes time…

Wow, there are an incredible number of students here right now. I used to get to school 10 minutes early and wait in the kitchen/break area until class. Now that’s a classroom and I have to sit on the stairwell. My teacher tells me most of the teachers are working 10 hours a day! I knew that this is supposed to be the busy season and all but sheesh! It hasn’t caused me any trouble though, so I suppose it’s no big deal…

Karl will be leaving thursday morning. That means we won’t have the seemingly required German guy in our house. I don’t know who will replace him, hopefully someone as cool. This last set of housemates have been really enjoyable, here’s to hoping that we keep it up!

I’ll be restarting my class tomorrow, and I’ll have another teacher. Not really sure why I keep getting new teachers, maybe I’m pissing them off or something… Anyway, I’m looking forward to it again, the trip back home did me worlds of good. Ana Jahiz lee arabie!

We’ve ben translating some short kid’s stories from English to Arabic the last couple of days and I’m getting a little frustrated. The teacher keeps changing things to the way he thinks they ought to be instead of translating the text. Maybe I’m being too anal about this, but if the exercise is to translate, the meanings should be as similar as possible. In my mind, this means not changing indefinite into definite articles, altering quotes, etc. Some examples:

“One of his uncles” gets translated to “His uncle”
A quote from a character in English is “Mother told me to stand by the door.” He translates it to “(his) mother told him to stand by the door.” When I protested that the charecter didn’t say that, he replied that it was more “correct.”

“He saw people from his window” turns into “He watched the people from his window.”

My teacher didn’t tell me that I didn’t understand the Arabic, but he didn’t see the difference. His versions were more “correct” in his mind. I really don’t think it’s the job of a translator (or a student trying to translate as an exercise) to “correct” the style or shades of meaning in the original. If the author said “He sat by a window,” in the original, there’s no reason to change it to “He sat by the window…”

The other, and more likely but depressing thought, is that his English comprehension just isn’t all that good. Normally I’d forgive this, but he is finishing up his degree in English, he just took an exam on “Macbeth.” True, it was a multiple choice (!?) exam, but still, he shouldn’t have any problems with the stuff we were doing. He certainly shouldn’t be corrected by his student… Grrrr… I don’t mind being wrong, but there isn’t any indication that I am…

… about the book that I bought. I had thought that it had something to do with Syria and religion. Well, after some quality time with a dictionary, I decided that it was a book about prosecuting the Bahai. Score! This would fit right into my current Old Testament mind frame… I took it to my teacher and he informed me that it was a biography of Slahaldeen. Yes, I got it completely wrong, but to be fair, it was his name that was throwing me off. I’m still not up to speed on Arabic names. I do OK with the “servant of…” names. It’s abd followed by one of the 99 names of God. Abdulla and the like… Many many Arabic names are simply Arabic words. Jameel (or the feminine version Jameela) is a name, it also means “beautiful.” “Justice,” “red,” “flower,” and even “pigeon,” (no I’m not kidding) are both words and names. So when I was translating the title of the book, the first word meant “to judge or prosecute,” the second word (deen) means “religion”, and the third word is very very close, but is not the word for Bahai. When you have two regular words back to back, I don’t anticipate them being names.

Anyway, the first sentence, roughly translated is, “Praise be to God Who brings (brought?) peace upon us and guides (guided?) us with His right hand to the best way (or method literally). That’s as far as I got when I brought it home. I was going to do some more last night, but the power went out. I’m too tired tonight to do any more Arabic. It reads in what I have come to believe is the typical formal Arab style. It’s really stuffy and I think a bit full of itself. There is what any typical English speaker would consider a lot of redundency. “John he was in love with her Sarah,” is typical. Pronouns are stuck in every which way. Usually, they aren’t mandatory, but they do lend emphasis. Sometimes some sort of grammar rule dictates that a pronoun has to be there, and pronouns are put in some places as well due to grammar rules even when they don’t add anything to the meaning of the sentence. This is one of the reasons I think that translated Arabic sounds so haughty. It’s partly because it is, but the grammar forces you to write in a certain style. I find it redundant and a bit opaque at times. For example, today in class I read a sentence that literally translated says, “You will not find the people that pollute there.” I thought that the meaning was pretty straightforward, there is pollution but you won’t find the people that did it. I was told that it actually means that there is no pollution. I asked why the words “find the ones who pollute” was negated and not finding pollution, but I never got a good answer. I gave him a few other ways of making the sentence clearer, at least to me. He agreed that they said the same thing. I said, no, they don’t, I negate the pollution, not the finding the people that did it. He wasn’t convinced, and since he’s the native speaker I guess I should defer to his judgement, but the style hides meaning I think. Unfortunately, it’s the style that I’ve got to work with….

Turns out I have a cold, that’s why I’m so tired. I don’t feel too bad, but my nose is running like crazy and I’m really tired. Class was a chore today. The only reason I went was because I went to bed early and felt decent this morning. I went downhill pretty fast during class and was having trouble remembering anything. I’ll try to learn what we went over today tomorrow morning, mostly vocab. With any luck I will have shaken this thing by tomorrow…

I had planned on doing some reading tonight. Either some more in the Bible, or my new Arabic book. The book in Arabic is a kid’s book, and it has something to do with religion in Syria… I think. I have decided that I need an independent reading project. Hopefully it will be interesting as well as useful to my Arabic. The first sentence is “God be praised.” Should be interesting, one way or the other.. I took a quick look at the first page to judge the level. I think it’ll be all right, I recognized 6 or 7 words out of 10. I either knew them or used to know them… I don’t think the grammar will be too much of a problem, but we’ll see. Like I said, I was planning on reading from one or both of those books tonight, but the power has gone out. Guess I’ll put sheets on the bed and go to sleep, nothing else to do…

Today in class we went over how to use “this,” “those,” and “that.” We also went over when to use aliph lam with those as well. I had “learned” this stuff before, but it definitely needed going over again. “This” is used for things that are right here whereas “that” is used for things over there. Of course in Arabic there is the singular, the plural, and the dual. And then there are the genders to worry about… OK, no problem, but there is a catch of course. All nonhuman plurals take on the singular feminine with it comes to their adjectives and their demonstrative pronouns (these, that, those). Errr, OK, I think I have that down. If you are using numbers, you use the dual if there are 2 and you use the plural if there are 3-11 of them. If they are nonhuman, you use the plural word for the noun, but describe them with singular, feminine adjectives. If there are more than 11, you use the singular version of the noun, but continue to use the feminine adjectives (singular) regardless of the gender of the noun. Of course if you are dealing with human plurals (sisters, engineers, students), you use the plural noun and have the adjectives agree with both the gender and the plural as long as there are 3-11 of them. If there are more than that, you use the singular noun but the plural adjective (I think) and the adjective must agree gender-wise…

So if we have a sentence like, “These are the new pens.” It ends up being literally translated as “This pens new.” What doesn’t translate is the singular feminine version of the adjective even though we are dealing with a plural masculine noun. Fun fun. If I were to add the actual numbers, it gets even better. “These are the 7 new pens,” ends up closer to “This the seven pens new.” If I go to a higher number like “These are the 15 new pens,” it ends up like, “This the 15 pen new.” Whoosh, and to think that there is much more complicated stuff than this to get through my head…

Aliph Lam are the two letters that make up the ubiquitous AL everything in Arabic. In general, it is the definite article, their equivalent of our “the”. Of course it isn’t as easy as just sticking AL in front of a word you want to make definite, there are different rules you have to follow. Today’s class was all about the correct placement of AL… Take these English sentences for example:

This is a beautiful house.
This is the beautiful house.
This house is beautiful.
This beautiful house is mine.

All of them are similar but have slight differences in meaning, mostly due to the placement of the definite article. It gets a little more tricky in Arabic because the verb “to be” is not used in the present tense, so the definite article also serves the purpose of pointing out where the (assumed) verb is. So the first sentence literally translated is:

This house beautiful.

The second sentence literally translated is:

This the house the beautiful.

The third sentence:

This the house beautiful.

I’m doing Ok with the rules, but the slight shading of the meaning is making my head spin. In other words, I can write and speak them OK, but I get confused by the meaning. I’ve got all of tomorrow off (Amin has to do something), so I’m hoping that I can figure it out and use “sadiqy aliph lam” properly soon…

Had my first class with my new teacher today. Amin is an interesting guy, has a degree in Arabic and is working on one in English. Last semester he was studying Shakespeare, I think that’s a pretty impressive thing for a nonnative speaker. Anyway, the class went well, we’re going to concentrate on listening and pronunciation mostly. Listening is probably my worst area at this point and today I learned part of the reason why. When you speak Arabic, many words get connected together. This helps explain why I have so much trouble picking out words when I listen to people. Even if I read along with someone speaking I have difficulty following along, everything just blends… So hopefully that will get better. It’s always tough to work on your weakest area. Yes, it can show the most improvement, but it is also the hardest thing to work on. Oh well… Wish me luck!