Day 8!

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Day 6!

For today, we started off the morning by continuing our lessons in Farsi. Dr. Dar and I reviewed the lessons that we learned this week, specifically, pronouns and the verb "To be." As we continue to review each lesson, I feel like I'm kind of getting the hang of everything, as it feels much easier to me than Arabic has been for the time that I've spent learning both of these languages. In addition to reviewing the previous lessons, we also learned about the numbers in Farsi. The pronunciation of the numbers in Farsi is much more different than it is in Arabic, however, some of the numbers, like 9 (نه) and 10 (ده) sound similar to both numbers are also said in Kashmiri. This similarity definitely made it a little bit easier to remember some of the Farsi numbers when we started to learn them. Afterwards, we reviewed the numbers for a little bit, and then we moved on to time. Specifically, Dr. Dar focused on how to say phrases like  "It's 1'o clock", or...
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Day 1!

To start off the first day of our course, I had a lecture from Dr. Dar about the transition from Classical Arabic Literature to Modern. He mainly talked about two authors, Taha Hussain and Naguib Mahfouz, more focusing on Naguib Mahfouz in the latter half of the lecture. Through Dr. Dar's lecture, I was able to learn much more about the history of Arabic Literature, as well as the specifics of Naguib Mahfouz's literature and writing style. Specifically, the transition from Classical Literature to Modern occurred because of the recent independence from the Ottoman Empire, as well as the influence of Western Literature. Naguib Mahfouz's stories were realistic in the beginning, focusing on the environment that was around him. Specifically, he wrote 3 novels which were about 3 generations of families in Cairo, Egypt. Later, he started to move away from strict realism, and he started to write more stories about more magical realism. One specific instance of this was his adaptati...
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Day 3!

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 Compared to the last two days, today was a little bit more Arabic Literature heavy, as I started off the day by reading this article about Naguib Mahfouz , that was given to me as in-class work by Dr. Dar yesterday. The article talked about many different topics surrounding Mahfouz, specifically his adaptation of The Arabian Nights , and the meaning behind his ending of his adaptation of this story. While reading this article, one specific aspect of Mahfouz's life that I never thought about was the fact that he received a lot of threats, specifically from an Islamist group. I never thought that Mahfouz's stories would cause any group of people to become so angry like that, but it turns out that I was wrong, as mentioned in the article, Mahfouz was attacked by a member of this group on October 14th, 1994. This attack left him barely able to write as much as he used to. I also thought that Mahfouz didn't deserve to have this type of attack against him, as I still don't u...
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