Categories: uncategorized
Date: 09 October 2005 05:12:51
ﺣﺸﯧﺶ was probably the class' favourite word of the day: you may know it as 'hashish' [that's sure to get me a few interesting Google visitors!] It does mean "grass" also. The people at church today were most impressed with my knowledge of this word. They also had a few tips for the rolling r and the deep h, which I gratefully received. After the service I said some simple greetings to the mother of one of our parishioners. She seemed quite happy to help me along.
In class yesterday we learnt the symbol for the doubling of a consonant first. Rather than having a letter repeated, as we do in English, the Arabic script has a character which is placed on top of a character: this indicates that the letter is to be pronounced for longer. I'm having a bit of difficulty distinguishing between the sounds of a single letter and a double one: there'll be a lot of practice of that this week!
We also learnt four new letters, representing the sounds sss, sh, a deeper sss and a deeper d. The deeper sounds are a bit troublesome: we tend to pronounce d at the front -- getting it to come from the back takes a bit of effort! But, practice, practice, practice!
Words learnt varied from secret to fence to light to arithmetic, not forgetting hashish! Some verbs with objects we learnt were he drank, she smiled, she grew up and he cuts.
Another great class. I'm very glad I decided to take up Arabic.