My teacher was telling me today that it isn’t my imagination, Arabic really is complicated. I met a guy on the bus who explained to me how easy it was for them to learn English. English grammar does seem like a piece of cake now. The trick with English is the vocabulary and the spelling. I do believe that English has, by far, the largest vocabulary of any language out there. Of course since we borrow from so many languages (A quote from our president, “The French have no word for entrepreneur.”) the spelling is all over the place.
Anyway, Abdul Summit (my teacher) tells me that at the local university you can take two years of classes on prepositions in Arabic, several more on verbs, etc. People spend their entire lives researching and innovating in the language itself. That’s pretty impressive…
One thing that I noticed today is how Arabic treats “to be”. In the present tense, simply being doesn’t require a verb at all. So “I am hungry” becomes “I hungry” in Arabic. The interesting thing is that because of the way words are derived from verbs, there are actually verbs for being surprised, hungry, sad, etc. The adjectives are derived from the verbs, along with the nouns. It can make translation a bit tricky, it certainly makes thinking about the sentences a workout… So here’s my understanding so far… There is a verb for “being happy”, from this we can derive the adjective “happy” and the nouns for the subject and object of the verb. The next form of the verb (which is pronounced slightly differently and also has slight conjugation differences) translates into making someone happy. From this we can derive the adjective for making someone happy, along with the subject (who is making someone happy) and the object (the person being made happy). Yes, there are words for all of these things. There are also different forms that I have not learned the meaning of yet. It’s an interesting system, but an expansive one. I’m starting to be able to recognize what part of speech words are even if I don’t know their definition, that’s handy. Participles and what we would consider gerunds are still giving me trouble. That leads to other problems, if I can’t tell the word is a noun, I can’t put definite articles (the ubiquitous AL-everything) on properly in strings of nouns and adjectives describing each other.
I picked up an Arabic newspaper today and tried reading an article. I’m making progress because unlike the last time, I was able to make some sense out if it. My estimate is that I was “getting” about 30% of the article. My teacher insists that that’s pretty good. It took me almost 5 minutes to read about 10 lines, so it’ll be awhile before I can just pick up a newspaper and start reading. I’m inching forward slowly….
Isaac