I'm taking this week off but here is some good news

Dear language-speaking friends,

I might be taking this week off. My kid was sick and my other kid is in the sky as we speak flying back from a holiday abroad at his dad’s, uncomfortably too far from any bomb shelters or countries that don’t need them, and my mom has not been doing well and all of it plus the local news made me dumb with stress. (Is that an expression? It is now.)

On the bright side, Maya asked me the other day, “How do you say ‘Do you want to play?’ in Thai?” and I blanked out for a few good seconds because I hadn’t touched Thai in a long time, but then guess what? I remembered it! Yàak lên mái?

And yay Google Translate still understands me 💃

Also, I’ve been listening to fairy tales in Arabic. The Little Red Riding Hood. Alladin and the Magic Lamp. The great thing about fairy tales is you can listen to them in any language and it’s extremely soothing even if you don’t understand anything. But they’re also a great way to learn because you already know what the story is about so you can figure out what is being said just from the intonation, and learn lots of new words this way.

Remember how during the last time we waited for an attack from Iran I couldn’t handle learning any Arabic? And now I find listening to The Little Red Riding Hood in Arabic soothing. We made progress here, didn’t we.

And when not listening to fairy tales, I’ve been watching this Israeli YouTube channel that teaches spoken Arabic. As with the Easy Portuguese channel, they interview people on the streets, only here it’s one person per video and everyone answers the same questions. The idea is the same: to get you used to real people speaking the language and saying the same things in different ways.

The questions range from “What’s your favorite dessert?” to “What Arabic word everybody has to know?” to “Why did the chicken cross the road?” to “Which famous person would you like to meet and why?”

I’ve been watching this video over and over again just for good vibes (and for the fuzzy feeling that after the 108th listen I already understand everything in here so well.)

When the girl in the video is asked which famous person she’d like to meet and why, she says she wants to meet the person who invented bombs and rockets and everything related to war. So she could ask him “Why?”

Oh hey, look, I’ve written some words after all, even though I was supposed to take this week off.

This was the longest sick leave note in the history of sick leave notes.

Anyway, thank you for bearing with me through good weeks and bad weeks, through long and short posts. If nothing drastic happens, we’ll be back with our regular scheduling next week I promise.