Actual fun with Arabic Part 1
There is a single word in Arabic that means "to make yourself stupid", and another word that means "To pretend to be stupid, but not actually be stupid". Which is really awesome.
Basically (and with the help of one of the best linguists in my class talking to me about grammar for half an hour just now), I have come to a revelation. Arabic is like Chinese. Chinese have those damn characters that are entire words, no phonetics. So in English, or any other sane language, we construct our words using phonetics but the Chinese just draw one character and it means the same thing, but shorter and with billions of them. Arabic is the same, except with words. In English, we build meaning "phonetically" with tons of words: "to have been sad", or "to pretend to be stupid but not actually be stupid". But in Arabic, there's just one word for all that that. They don't use phonetic meanings, they just have one word to mean all of it. Ten billion.
But with a pattern. That I may someday be able to understand.
So that's cool.
In other news, I am AWESOME because I ran two miles in 17 minutes, which is faster than I've ever run before, like ever. Still slow. But faster. And I know it's good because my platoon sergeant has stopped saying 'Good job, you're really improving', and started saying 'I know you can be faster than that, Jedeed, stop slacking off'. So I guess I will :--).