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solaciolum: King of Night Vision, King of Insight (Default)
Time Traveler Extraordinaire

November 2014

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solaciolum: Please be careful, I exist in someone else's head. (Annie)
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 11:36 pm
Had Persian and Arabic today- the classes are on different campuses, and less than an hour apart, which is going to be fun when it gets colder and the buses are even more overloaded than they already are. Also, going from thinking in Arabic to thinking in Farsi gives me brain cramps, and my words keep coming out in the wrong order. >_<

om nom nom languages )
solaciolum: Yoshitaka Amano Tarot: The Hermit (hermit)
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 09:46 pm
Not dead! Just...hiding, I guess. Feeling a little burnt out for various reasons.

Last week in class our instructor went off on a brief tangent about forming comparative and superlative adjectives while we worked on our quiz review- and I just want to apologize to the Arabic language for all the nasty things I've said about it with regard to irregular plurals, because omg, comparative adjectives are beautiful.

Add an alif and take out all the other vowels! It's so elegant! (One of my classmates heard "elephant" instead of "alif," which meant I was drawing little Comparative Elephants all over my paper. Class gets a bit silly sometimes.) The superlative is just the comparative plus the definite article, which is also delightful. I actually did a little hand flap of glee, and got a collective o_O look from everyone who saw me do it. I got the same look when I commented on the sexiness of conjugation charts. XD

The instructor for this half of the class is a Palestinian woman who works in the university library and speaks six languages. She'll also be teaching the second half of Intermediate, which excites me, because she's fantastic.

I'm still That Girl, but everyone now knows and accepts that I am That Girl, and they mostly find it useful or amusing. The teacher occasionally makes me sit out when we play vocab games, because I know the words too well. >_< (I am not the only person who does, mind you- there are two or three other students who are just as proficient as I am at this point. I'm just the only person who gets singled out for being a bit ahead of the rest of the class. It's a bit mortifying, but I've reached the point where I don't care terribly much.)

In another universe, I went to a big university the first time around, and double majored in Linguistics and Middle Eastern Studies; I'd be in grad school now, and proficient in several languages, instead of just figuring out that this is what makes me happy. Better late than never, I suppose. I just wish I had a little more time; I graduate next year, and I need to start deciding what I'll be doing next summer and after.
solaciolum: Luffy gets it better than most. (strange waters)
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 12:50 pm
درس قارسی می خوانم- درس فارسی نمی خورم

(I study the Persian lesson- I do not eat the Persian lesson.)
It's a subtle distinction, but an important one- even if you do eat pretty much everything else in this language.

A few weeks ago the class took a field trip to an antique rug dealer in the city, who showed us parts of his private collection- we got to pet 160-year-old silk carpets from Qom, and compare the designs on Afghan tribal rugs to rugs from Isfahan. Very neat stuff, although I only understood one word in three. I shouldn't let myself feel frustrated by this, but it's hard not to- my listening comprehension in English is bad enough, so I shouldn't expect any great proficiency in a language I've only been studying for a semester and a half. (It means I should really be studying more, however; my capacity to retain vast swathes of vocabulary is not what it once was.)

There was a long and bitchy rant about my Gender and Sexuality class and my general irritation with the professor and many of my classmates and damn the patriarchy etc., etc., but something horrible happened to the formatting and now it is gone. It's for the best, really.

Still need to watch the new Doctor Who; still trying not to resort to hiding in the basement and shunning all of humanity for the rest of the month- it's been one of those weeks. (Yes, yes, I know, "When isn't it one of those weeks?" *sigh*)