Photos from a 10-Hour Bus Trip

No time for writing, but yesterday we slogged from Fes to Marrakech by bus, and here's what happened along the way:







Promising to actually write soon,

Ustaz

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Year 1 Review: Adverbs and Passive Voice

As-salaamu 'alaikum! In this final review module of the year, I'm going to cover two units from April that I was not present to actually teach in person. Unfortunately, understanding either relies on hearing short sound changes that are hard to convey in writing. I encourage you to look up videos on YouTube to hear what I'm referring to, or email me directly. The first subject of today is the Arabic adverb , a type of word that (like in English) describes how a verb is done. Adverbs in English are made out of adjectives and tend to end in "-ly," so "quick" (an adjective) becomes "quickly" (an adverb) in the same way as "angry" becomes "angrily." Arabic adverbs are more versatile in that you can make one out of an adjective or  a noun. So while adverbs like "elephant-ly" or "book-ly" do not exist in English, they are perfectly viable in Arabic. The way to make one of these Arabic adverbs is to add a
Read more

Year 1 Review: Perfect and Imperfect Tense

Hello and salaam, In last week's review, I went over the magical verbless sentence, Arabic's way of getting around the words "is," "am," and "are." For this week's review, I'd like to go over the other kind of sentence in Arabic, the verbal sentence. I don't want to be confusing at all: this is literally just a sentence with a verb, and a verb is just any action word (eat, drink, cook), as you might have learned in an English class. Tense  is just a grammar word for time, and Arabic has two of them: the perfect tense and the imperfect tense . "Perfect" means a verb already happened, whether it was terrible (I broke  my arm) or terrific (I won  Best New Reggae Artist), whereas "imperfect" means one of five things: either the verb didn't happen (I wasn't  sad), the verb is happening (I love  coffee), the verb is not happening (I do not eat chameleon meat), will happen (I will see you later), or won't h
Read more

Year 1 Review: The Verbless Sentence

,Marhaba ya shabab As the year comes to a close in such a strange way, I understand that some of you will be despairing about what you really learned of Arabic. And the answer is: a lot! But it's only natural, if speaking Arabic is not part of your day, to think that it's  simply gone in one ear and out the other. So over our last few weeks, to defeat this feeling and prepare you for your superhero final, I want to offer some review lessons in the basic grammar of Arabic  Verbless sentences, or sentences that would   rely on an “is / are / am” in English, can be made in Arabic  by managing the definiteness of the terms . Definite  terms fall into three   types : words with alif - lam ( “the” ) , proper nouns like names or countries, and nouns with possessive suffixes .  Possessive suffixes are how Arabic makes things “mine” or “yours” or “his,”   and here they are in red in  this  handy chart أنا ـ ي نَحْنُ
Read more