Mysterious Languages of the Arabs, Berbers and Italians...

I UNPLUGGED my TV aerial (again) and tuned in loads of Italian channels (Rai 1, Rai 2, Rai 3, Rai Scuola, Rai Storia ...etc)  plus a couple of good ones in German (ZDF and Das Erste), TV5 Monde FBS and TV5 Monde Europe in French... plus over 120 channels in Arabic. So I'm doing courses in Italian and Arabic just so's I can understand my own TV set's polyglot babblings ...

أنا أتكلم العربية قليلا

Yes I've been learning a bit of a mysterious Semitic language! (Arabic.)

In my attempts to acquire some of the native lingo, I've been following quite a few Moroccan soap operas in the night. Perhaps the term "following" is a little optimistic. I watch the dubbed shows, gazing at things like street signs, cars, architecture and countryside etc to try and figure out which country these programmes originated in. Quite a lot seem to come from Pakistan (Asian features and manic-episode-style Arabic script) and Turkey (weird-taste interior décor and the Latin alphabet, eg Turkish police cars =labelled POLIS).

So I've been banging away at the Arabic, a little every day. I "mastered" (in the sense that a two-year old child "masters" it) the script in three days, but in the 3-weeks+ since,my command of it doesn't seem to have drastically improved since... also they don't commit as much of their words to paper as we do (most short vowels are left out) ~ so Arabic is a bit like trying to learn to write a foreign tongue via txtmsg-speak.

Arabic words are very difficult to remember. But once I know them I can recognize them straight away in conversation eg when they're babbling away on Al Aoula TV, which is my new favourite channel, I can pick out expressions such as mumtaz and mumkin with ease. Which was never the case when I did basic Chinese (a lot of Chinese words sound the same, and it's not just the tones...)

Moroccan TV has a lot of early-morning programming in French, which is great for an insomniac like me. I've been to Morocco... surely the boat-trip from Spain has to be the most drastic journey on earth... Europe to Africa... it's like voyaging into another dimension...

In 2011 the Moroccan government gave legal recognition to the mysterious Berber language of the snowy hashish mountains and shimmering camel-trotting deserts, which is written in its own ancient runes... How cool is that! Here's a Moroccan roadsign in Arabic, Tasselhaït and French... don't you think it's cool...?

The Italian's coming on really fast. Faccio un diario segreto in italiano. Lo trovo piuttosto semplice perche la grammatica italiana corre in parallelo con la francese. Per esempio, se vorrei dire che qualcosa accada a Milano, userei la stessa parola "a" come in francese: "à"... 

Does that make any sense to you? It does to me now! (I'm not claiming to have any command over grammar whatsoever, I just kind of dunk it here and there, like a corgi's nose at a Royal Tea Party...

So I'd really like to go back to Morocco. + Italy. So these foreign idioms are going to come in extremely useful one day not too long away...

O well I must rush. 

Spero che tutti sono bene...

أتمنى لجميع بشكل جيد.