Friday, July 20, 2007

Arabic Verbs are killing us!!!!

We are now deep into our language study and it's getting harder each day. The first part of our program was pretty easy because all we had to do was memorize names for nouns such as couch, chair, floor, cat, etc... Well, the easy part is over!! We have discovered that each verb in Arabic has over 50 forms: There are 8 conjugations of each verb, there's 48 with past, present, future and negations for each, then 8 infinitives and 3 participles for each. So, that is clearly over 50 ways to say ONE VERB!!!!!
Here's a short video of our language helper saying one verb (study) ONLY in it's present and past tense forms.
By the way, we wrote this in transliteration because we haven't learned to read and write very well with their alphabet!! :) I THINK WE ARE LOSING OUR MINDS!!!

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