The Magic of Hans-Wehr
Part of our homework for the night was to go out and buy the Arabic-English Hans-Wehr dictionary. We are learning how to looking things up in the dictionary which is always a good skill to have, but this does not have an English-Arabic component and looking things up in Arabic is a little stressful. You have to go through the word you don't know, determine the three letter root, and then look up the root alphabetically. Seems only slightly more complicated than English, but the root isn't always apparent and in some cases one of the letters is not actually in the word your looking at. It can be found in another form of the word, but if you don't know the other forms then you can't be sure the root is correct because you can basically only make educated guesses based on patterns of similar words. And the listing by root makes it a little more uncomfortable to actually find the words in the dictionary, because you have to hunt down the instance you are looking for through all of the other similar words and there are a bunch of different beginnings and extra letters to throw you off that have no bearing on the listing. Its also kind of amusing because this dictionary is actually a translation of an Arabic-German dictionary so they have some round about definitions that are a little awkward to understand because they all go from Arabic to German to English, and also the dual translation process makes it take longer so it is a little out of date, as they are on the 6th edition in Germany and only the 4th here. But the bonus to the crazy root system, is that next to "reporter" you get "to beat" and a bunch of other words that wouldn't normally be next to each other in English event hough they are spelt completely differently they happen to have similar roots.