I am to totally impressed with SachaChua’s blog. It uses PlannerMode and all that, but I don’t care about that. What I really do care about is that she seems to have on every page a sentence in Japanese saying something about a cat. This is the perfect exercise.
.أَنَا أَشْرَبُ قَهْوَةً كَيْلا أَنَامَ
You would not believe how much time it took me to write that sentence. Discover how to use the Arabic input method on OSX, discover how to do vocalization (since that is usually missing), and – most of all – how to written that damn full-stop at the end such that it actually appeared at the left of the text and not at the right. Reminds me of the days when I implemented the Unicode BiDiAlgorithm in EmacsLisp. I finally figured it out. At the very beginning I used u202E, the “RIGHT-TO-LEFT OVERRIDE”. 😄
So, what does it say? My homework was to write some sentences. This was one of them. It says “I drink coffe so I don’t sleep.”
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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I missed taglines from BBSing days. =) I downloaded a text file containing lots and lots of examples, then used Emacs to randomly pick one. I’ve changed my cat filter to computers at the moment as they’re also quite fun. I wonder if there’s a list of sample Arabic sentences; maybe you can compile such a database!
– SachaChua 2005-05-01 17:50 UTC
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What, you’re not writing them yourself as a translation exercise? Right now my Arabic teacher wants me to write a few sentences every week which we then discuss. The sentences I’m picking come from this pool of corrected sentences.
– Alex Schroeder 2005-05-01 18:00 UTC