re: #228 Backwoods_Sleuth

When I was learning to read & write Arabic & Farsi it took a long time for my brain to start recognizing the letters as representing sounds without having to mentally transliterate them back into their English equivalents (or the nearest thing to an equivalent). Oddly enough, at times I’d go to write something in English from right to left instead of LTR—it was weird because I’d just sit there for a second or two with my pen or pencil hovering over the paper, unable to figure out exactly what was wrong.

The worst part about those languages is the absence of written short vowels (I believe Hebrew is the same), especially since using the wrong one can drastically change the meaning of a word. It’s not so bad in the Qur’an because it always has all the diacritical marks so you know exactly what the word is, but in regular (Modern Standard) Arabic, like what you read in newspapers, they’re mostly absent. Ditto for Farsi—it doesn’t use them at all, so you have to understand the context to know which word is being used.

Then there are the different cultural references & symbolism… It’s like you have to climb into a completely different headspace to really understand them.