Last night was my first Arabic class. If I don't end up getting called up by the Navy to deploy, I hope to take the 2 year Arabic sequence offerred at my local community college. (Owens Community College.) The main reason I want to learn Arabic is because of the likelihood of a deployment to the middle east or Africa. Fortunately for me, Toledo has a huge concentration of native Arabic speakers due to our large Lebanese-American population. Oddly, though, the instructor is Egyptian. Go figure.
Studying a language that is neither Romance nor Germanic really gives you an appreciation for how logical other languages are, and how horribly illogical English is. I think this lack of structure makes English one of the world's most beautiful languages, but my heart goes out to anybody who has to learn it.
We're a hodgepodge of everything, including semetic influences, in addition to the obvious Germanic and Latin roots. This language must be a bear to learn. A person only needs to consider how many full grown adults, who are native speakers of English, manage to absolutely mangle the language every day to realize that English is not a language for wimps.
The first semester, we will be learning maybe a couple of hundred words. However, the first 25 hours of classroom and 50 hours of homework are going to be devoted to mastering the alphabet. That's a lot of work just to put the training wheels on.
The homework load doesn't seem that bad right now. I also have the luxury of taking just one class. I never have functioned very well in an academic environment, so one class is probably the right courseload for me.
1 comment:
That's semi-true.
And yeah, we're a hodgepodge. No doubt, german grammar with latin and greek words . .
Spanish has lots of verb conjugations that are just crazy.
And Arabic is logical to a point with it's three letter roots and the word forms there in.
But wait till you start talking about possessives and masc/fem, when you get to that, all bets are off . . .
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