Ze Nude Home

I'm going to start by saying that ARABIC IS HARD. I have a deep respect for anyone who has ever learned it. Deep, deep respect.

This month, the Real McCoy's and I are taking a language intensive course that, inshallah, should push out of the novice level and into intermediate. Inshallah...and that's a big inshallah because my brain still feels full and wants to reject all new information.

Teacher is teaching us body parts and grammatical patterns that can be found when adding possessive endings to the words. That translates: We're learning how to say, "my hand, your hand, his hand, her hand, our hands, yall's hands, their hands." ETC.

Since ARABIC IS HARD, we've been doing about 3 body parts a day until we'd finally figured out the patterns and mastered them. So you can understand how hard: we're in class three hours a day, and we were learning 3 body parts a day. No, it didn't take us a full hour to learn one body part. It took 45 minutes, and the rest of the time we spent simply describing what we'd done the evening before. Because it really does take me 15 minutes to say, "It was so hot I couldn't do anything but watch a dvd."

Today, however, we must have finally proved that we'd mastered the system, because Teacher wrote the entire rest of the list of body parts that we hadn't learned yet up on the board for us to copy down into our notebooks. A million words. Thank you, Teacher. We each took turns adding possessives. My cheek, your cheek, his cheek, her cheek, etc.

When it came to my turn, I had to do the word for "upperarm," which is z.nood. I started with "my upper arms," and said, "ze.nood.ee." And then I giggled, and so did Mr. Real McCoy. We both thought that it sounded funny. Without even thinking anything further than that, we just thought the sound was silly and it made us giggle.

But Teacher asked why it sounded funny. Mrs. Real McCoy said it sounded like "snooty" to her, and that all made us giggle a little more. Then she added that it also sounded like "nude," which made us all giggle even more.

I continued, "you upper arms," -- ze.nood.ek. More laughter.

"His upper arms," -- ze.nood.oo. Laughter is becoming almost incontrollable at this point.

By the time I got to "their upper arms," --ze.nood.hom-- We were all howling with laughter. We'd lost it. So much language plus the summer heat had gone to our heads and made us baffy. But then Mrs. Real McCoy did us in. She said, "It sounds like a French person talking about a nudist's house."

Ze nude home.

I seriously have not laughed that hard since I've been in Africa. All four of us had tears in our eyes. I was doubled over. Oh my goodness. Laughter like that is good for the soul and much needed when learning Arabic.

Because ARABIC IS HARD.