re: #225 wrenchwitch

Someday I want to learn to read Arabic.

There used to be this young American kid that was a taxi driver back in TX. We called him Forrest Gump becuase, well, he looked a lot like him and was very innocent and friendly. Anyway, I was practicing writing my Farsi & Arabic one day and he came up and remarked that is must be really difficult to learn because “It’s just meaningless squiggles all over the paper—how can you even learn to make that into words??”

I had to laugh and remind him that ALL alphabets are just meaningless squiggles until your brain learns becomes so familiar with them that they’re almost instantaneously associated with certain sounds. He was utterly thunderstruck; apparently that had never occurred to him before. LOL