Fun with Words

Learning Arabic is interesting. And hard. Here are some reasons:

#1 There is one word "shd" that means all of the English verbs "to catch" or "to hold" or "to take" or "to close".

#2 There are so many words that have many Arabic words for our one English word. For example, we say "I asked". There are two words you could use. One means to ask something of and one just means to ask a question.

#3 The word "to mumble" is "gumgum"

#4 The word for "politics" is "siasa". The word for "to sweet talk" is "sias". It's the same root! Interesting...

#5 Speaking of "interesting" the word for it is the same word as "important" which can be confusing for us.

#5 Root verbs can be modified with tiny symbols that make them causative. For example, the same word is used for "to get on" and "to put something on". The word is "rkb" for "to get on" and if you are putting something on a taxi you say "rkb" but you say the "k" twice as long. We have a really hard time with this.