Véante mis ojos

When I was in college, I read all kinds of poetry. Very little of it stuck with me. I'm just a prose kind of girl, I guess. Except I remember this villancico, almost just a poetry fragment. Santa Teresa of Ávila based one of her mystical poems on it, about the ecstacy it must be to see god (check it out here) but I prefer the original snippet:

Véante mis ojos
y muérame yo luego,
dulce amor mío
y lo que yo más quiero.

Not that I'd want to drop dead after seeing my beloved. But this just sticks in my mind as uber-romantic and over the top, while being very simple language.

I also remember one that begins ¿Qué faré, mama? that we studied to see language shift. Its narrator is a young girl whose lover has abandoned her, asking what now would she she do, which would eventually turn into ¿qué haré, mama? What will I do?

For more villancicos, check out this link.

I'm such a dork

My copy of Al-Mawrid arrived on Friday.

Isn't it beautiful?

Online booksellers

I <3 online booksellers. The instructor recommended two dictionaries: Al-Mawrid, which is alphabetical; and Hans Wehr, which is based on the 3 letter root of Arabic words. New, the dictionaries cost ~$75 and $45 each, but are worth investing in if I plan to continue with Arabic...and I do. So I checked out a couple of online booksellers and found copies for sale: instead of $120, I'm paying ~$70. Yay for my bank balance!

I'm perplexed about dual nouns. I shouldn't be -- Russian has a bunch of nouns that change based on number: one, two-four, then five +.

Verbs

Well, we learned our first verbs on Saturday. Unlike other languages I've learned, the past tense is closer to the root word than the present tense, and seems much easier to master. The instructor created a "cheat sheet" using the verb "to write" (katab). Unfortunately, though, I have lost my cheat sheet. Took it to work and studied it during a boring, boring training seminar. I'm hoping it's just mixed in with the seminar handouts. That's what I get for trying to study when I should've been paying attention to something else.

On the Russian front: not good. I've more or less gotten the run-around from the level 3 instructor. Grrr. Not returning my calls or responding to emails.