The prednisone and/or clariton seems to be working. The itching/burning/pain is much better, and the swelling on my face has gone down somewhat. Which is not to say that I don't look freakish and weird, but at least I can see better. And my ears don't hurt as much. On the other hand, the rash is still spreading. It seems to finally have decided ( Read more... )

Today, my Swahili teacher was talking about how odd he finds it that we (Americans) measure distance in time (city X is so many hours from city Y). I'd never consciously noticed this before, because it seems so natural to me. But apparently in Kenya, you'd never do this; you'll always give an actual distance in miles. Which makes perfect sense, ( Read more... )

Swahili has a word meaning "to hurt someone by inadvertently bumping a sore or wound": -tonesha.

( It's a picture. )

According to someone on linguaphiles and confirmed by my dictionary:

'na', meaning 'and' or 'with', can be combined with the 2nd syllable of a pronoun (mimi, wewe, yeye, sisi, ninyi, wao) to mean "with (pronoun)".

*happy*

Monday was the most memorable day I've had in a while. Yay for breaking my routine. :D ( Read more... )

First ( Read more... )

ASL continues to be amazing. For some reason, repeating the same phrases over and over again doesn't seem anywhere near as boring as it would in another (spoken) language. And yet, words and phrases and such are so much easier to pick up right away and just remember ( Read more... )

For the past week, time seems to have slowed. It sounds like a bad thing when put like that, but it's not at all. For ... years ... I've felt vaguely like time was just slipping away from me, flashing by, gone before I could even notice it had come. Moving faster than I could possibly hope to keep up with, and me too tired to even bother trying. ( Read more... )

There's a kitten helping me type. Only he's not very helpful.

Swahili keeps amazing me with it's general amazing beautifulness. I swear, Spanish is ugly by comparison. <3 And the words greatly amuse me. It's sad, though, since so many words have a traditional Swahili version and a stolen-from-English/French version. But the meanings are still fun ( Read more... )

Swahili has more words "of" than any language could possibly need (all deriving from the rood -a, of course, and they'd probably need them if I knew what the difference was, but I don't >>;): cha, kwa, la, mwa, pa, vya, wa, ya, za. Though clearly there *is* a difference, since if you ask "Habari ya leo?" (How are you today?; lit. News of today), ( Read more... )