So, earlier today, I was working on those flash card revisions that I mentioned last night. There's this Arabic word that's been repeating itself in my head every few days for the last few weeks: losamat. For the life of me, I couldn't remember where I'd heard it, what it meant, or if it was even Arabic. I tried looking it up online, with no success. Solution: call Hussein and ask.
Problem: Hussein didn't answer his phone. This resulted in calls to Dhiya and Nadia, neither of whom answered their phones, either. I finally got a hold of Majd - the only remaining Arabic speaker I know - and he didn't recognize the word. This was all happening on my lunch break, so I had no choice but to go back into work without having my curiosity satisfied. When I got out of work, I had a message waiting from Hussein that said to call him back and tell him what the word was; but he didn't recognize it, and couldn't talk. Then I called Dhiya again and, much to my surprise, he asked me the specific word - which meant that he was right next to Hussein. Dhiya didn't recognize it either, but he told me he'd think about it and get back to me.
A while later, I finally got a hold of Nadia. After pronouncing it to her over the phone, about eight or ten times, she finally figured out what word I meant, and told me that it meant "excuse me" - not surprising, giving the level of Arabic instruction that I've undergone thus far. I thanked her, and then she abruptly got off the phone, and I'm actually still waiting for her to call back, which may or may not happen today. So, as I was looking it up online (it's amazing how much more you can get when you have a second piece to the puzzle), who would call back but Dhiya, with a couple of guesses as to what the word meant. I explained to him that someone had told me what it meant, and told him that it meant "excuse me", but that didn't register with him. After discussing his ideas, and then giving him a few of the pieces of information I'd found, it hit him, and he was able to explain the word in its entirety, and give me a spelling, which I was then able to plug into Google Translate in order to get a reasonable translation.
Word: لو سمحت
Transliteration: law samaht, lau semaht, lo samaht
Translation: "if allowed", "if you please"
So, it's on a card, and entered into the vocabulary vending system that is my wire mesh card file. Even so, I doubt I'll be forgetting that word any time soon after all of this effort.
As I was flipping through my cards yesterday, trying to find the ones with errors, I decided that another thing that I need to do is make two separate classifications for the cards that I have: words and short phrases, and long phrases/sentences. A few of the long phrases are good, like نحن جند لله جند الوطن ("We are the army of God and of our land" - the national motto of Sudan); but overall, I think that sentences and phrases are of more use to me if I'm translating them and pulling them apart to figure out grammar, and I'm not quite to the point of being ready to do that on a regular basis yet. I've never been that good at memorizing full sentences, which is part of the reason that I only know a few short verses of scripture - most of which are now on those very flash cards that need their own category. So as I'm going through the cards over the next day or two, I'll pull the ones that have sentences or long phrases, and reclassify their numbers as "P1" and so on to denote that it's a "Phrase Card", and leave the cards with one or two words, or three- or four- word phrases, just as they are.
Some of the interesting words on the cards that I fixed today included:
So, I may do a bit more of that before I rack out tonight, but with all of this "lo samaht" business, I think I've done my bit for the day. I can't wait to have these damned note card revisions finished, because I think that once I can get started on doing the actual lessons, it'll take a lot less effort and it will feel a lot less like I have a huge project hanging over my head.
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