Thursday, September 28, 2006

I can read!

Today I read two of the four words on a billboard. They said, "Now, your car."
I memorized the other two words and asked my Arabic teacher at school about them. She told me they meant "Deserves the advantage." Then she said she thought I could read the newspaper. Um, no.
But that little display of Arabic prowess earned me forgiveness for forgetting one (!) verb: یڄری to run.

2 comments:

Nate said...

Even if you can't read everything, at least you can read that cool writing. I sometimes think that learning arabic or hebrew would be worth it just for the cool looking graffiti you could write.

David said...

Indeed. I have learned almost none of the vocabulary and grammar, but I have learned the alphabet. It allows me to read brand names, place names, and otherwise recognizable words, e.g. "Kuka Kula," "Riyadh," and "Subermarkt." I write messages to the kids in English, transliterated into Arabic script, and it is like a cool secret code! We used to do this a bit with Cyrillic when we lived in Eastern Europe, but the Arabic is far cooler and much harder for the uninitiated to decipher.