Categories: linguistics, study
Date: 06 November 2006 20:46:44
Another fun class last night: though hard work, quite hard work. Our teacher brought in her niece who sat through the class with us, and seemed to enjoy watching us try and learn the language.
We looked at plurals and how to form them. As is the case when you are learning another language, it is often a case of just accepting and learning, rather than looking for rules (e.g. genders in French or German), and that is the case for Arabic plurals [we were told there are some deeper rules, but they rely heavily on grammatical points we've yet to encounter and it might scare us: good enough for me].
In terms of plurals, as well as singular and plural as we have in English, Arabic also has words for when you are talking about two of something, which is something English doesn't have. That has been left for another day, and we focussed on the plurals, for when there are three or more.
There are three categories of plurals: broken plurals, which follow no pattern of forming plurals from singular: you can add letters, drop letters, change vowels...; masculine, which have two ways of forming plurals, by adding two letters; and feminine, which have two letters [different to the masculine ones] added to form plurals. I suspect this week will be spent memorising quite a few plurals.
We also reviewed the words for I, you [for males, females and plural: there are different words for each], he, she, we and they, and practiced with some sentences. As someone commented to me after class, we've reached the point where we realise just how much we don't know: we can form simple sentences and talk about some things, but there is a lot of grammar, and a lot of vocabulary, ahead of us. But, it's great fun; and I'm loving it.