Tuesday, December 23, 2008

It's all Greek to Me

I've actually been looking for an excuse to use that post title, because since last thursday Annette and I have been trying to implement the greek alphabet into our language program. This was actually a very cool expeirience. Together we animated all 24 letters. Actually, this is a bigger job than it sounds like, because we had to do the uppercase alphabet as drawn by the right hand and as drawn by the left, plus the lowercase alphabet in right and left handed. So... 24 x 4... what is that? Oh yeah, 96 animations. But we did them all in 4 days, so that's cool. And thanks to all this repetition, I have memorized all the greek letters' names and shapes.

You want to know the letters in order? Here they are: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta, Iota, Kappa, Lambda, Mu, Nu, Xi, Omicron, Pi, Rho, Sigma, Tau, Upsilon, Phi, Chi (pronounced Kie), Psi, and last but not least, Omega. Phew! To see their shapes, I reccomend you go to the web site with our languages and click the greek flag. Here's the link.

Anyway, the reason I'm using this title is that this morning Annette and I were trying to download an Arabic font. Oh, it's not the Arabic alphabet that's greek to me, though at first it does look intimidating with all the funny loops and dots. I saw a cute YouTube vid that shows the arabic letters in a very simple and cute way. This link will let you see Arabic in quite a non-threatening fasion. No. The fact that I had to figure out what to download was all greek to me.

I hate having to download stuff. Wait, maybe hate is too strong a word. I really dislike downloading stuff. It's as if I'm letting a complete stranger into my computer. And I know that downloads can be tricky, like they might sneak up behind you and say you need to pay for this or something. I don't download songs off the internet. None of us do anyway. Why would you when you can copy them from a c.d. from the library, for free? But anyway, it seems as if Annette is in the right direction with this, so I'll let her take the helm.

Soon I might be memorizing the Arabic alphabet. Well, maybe not quite so easily. I hear that besides there being 28 individual letters, when you write words there are different letters for if they come at the beginning of a word, in the middle of a word, and at the end of a word, so I'll be pretty overloaded right there!

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