Category 3!

I knew it! I'm not just stupid!!!

I've spent the last hour struggling to write a seven-line note to my housekeeper in Arabic. Usually this is the "special request" I use as an exercise with my tutor. But since this semester went haywire, I haven't been having the tutoring sessions. I suppose I could call her and laboriously have her check my spelling over the phone - or worse, I could email her what I want to say and have her email me back. But I figured I'd go the tough route and try it on my own.

And then I found Google Translate. Seems like a miracle, right?

(Cairo denizens are going to anticipate what comes next ...)

... Except everything is translated into foosha! Bloody Modern Standard Arabic, which has completely different words for the things you might actually want to say day-to-day.

A mother of a friend kindly gifted me her English-Arabic dictionary because it actually has Arabic writing, rather than transliteration (like the book AUC gave us). Transliteration is ghastly, because everyone (including me) has their own system, and transliteration doesn't actually work with Arabic very well into English. Everything is so different, the stresses, writing or not writing vowels (still haven't figured this out), different sounds ... gaaaaah. And where is this marvelous gift? Sitting on my desk at work, of course.

I was googling around, trying to find an Aemeya translator (into Egyptian Arabic), when I found this nice description of the dialect. At the bottom of the page it says, "How difficult is it to learn Arabic? Arabic is a Category III language in terms of difficulty for speakers of English."

No shit. Apparently my dreadful accent is (somewhat) mitigated by the astonishing fact that I can make myself pretty well understood here, and I can even read. No small feat. I managed it in about 4 weeks, but the no-vowels deal is a killer. As far as I'm concerned, they're all a's until proven otherwise.

Category III is the hardest category they've got - the other languages in it are Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean. Japanese has even got a little star next to it, meaning it's even worse than the other ones!

[Sigh] So I'm only category three lazy and dumb.