Nisba Adjectives - Round Four

First day of class is over and I'm already starting to wonder whether I'm ready to study FusHa and Ameyya at the same time. Arabic is hard enough without trying to remember which word is Egyptian and which is classical. This school has also adopted a more formal register of FusHa than I've studied previously - apparently learning case endings in the first class. Case endings, what?!

Also, for some reason, I've had to re-learn nisba adjectives three or four times now. A "nisba" adjective is a proper noun that has been converted into an adjective, e.g., "Egypt" to "Egyptian" or "Sweden" to "Swedish." It's a very simple process in Arabic and I'm not sure why it has been revisited so often in my classes. We reviewed them again today, but this time the instructor had found a set of flashcards illustrated with the most appalling racial and culture stereotypes I've ever seen (in a school setting, anyway). If you want to know the Egyptian attitude towards the Sudanese, look no further than the crude caricature of the "Sudaniyya" we saw today. The drawing of a Japanese man looked like a piece of World War II propaganda. I was glad that we didn't learn the nisba adjective for Isreali, because it almost certainly would have been a rat with a hooked nose greedily rubbing its paws together before he drinks the blood of a gentile baby. Shocking stuff.

Today's non-Arabic task is to find a supermarket. I've successfully collected enough small bills to keep me in shawarma through the rest of the month, so no need for groceries, but I'm in desperate need of mosquito repellent. You can tell which side of my face I slept on last night because it's the only bit not covered in welts. Thank goodness it's not Ms. Chadha in my place - she doesn't take well to mozzie bites.

I just met my new neighbor. He's Austrian and tells me that he's from just outside Vienna, which, I am told, is the capital of his country. I said I was familiar with Vienna and he seemed delighted: "oh, you know it?!" Either he's being very modest or the American reputation for ignorance of geography precedes us.