I'm just saying -- again and again

So I have been trying to learn Arabic because there are Arabic versions of Samaritan scripture -- in fact, originally they used Saadiah Gaon's version but it didn't track with the differences between Samaritan Pentateuch and Jewish Torah, so now there are at least two standard Arabic versions, both of which I found in a hardcopy edition.

Back to my sheep. I am finding the same problems in Arabic grammars that I found in grammars of Classical Greek. 

And I have to think that part of the problem with learning languages is that the grammarians who published either are lazy and copied from their sources without critical thinking -- which I'm sure is true with Classical Greek -- or they couldn't get published if they told the truth about the language.

And so while some grammars admit that Arabic is aspectual, like ancient Semitic languages and Slavic languages, most of them keep talking about past tense. Even James Price is guilty of it. No wonder the people he tried to work with, fresh off supposedly studying Arabic in college, were illiterate in Arabic.

So if you take Arabic and the instructor talks tense, drop the course and tell the department why you did it.

What's worse, Latin labels like "jussive" and "subjunctive" have been slapped on Arabic verb forms, when they have other functions. 

The laziness comes out in discussions of I'rab. Because it involves nouns that change their endings in certain circumstances, too many grammars call it declension. It's not. If your Arabic instructor talks declension, drop the course and tell the department why.

What's more, if your instructor calls Nasb "accusative", drop the course and tell the department why. Nasb has absorbed pretty much any usage in Arabic that Jarr does not work for. Some of these functions are instrumental in other languages, or comitative, or get the label dative slapped on them. Plus also drop the course if your instructor calls Jarr "genitive". 

It's like what I said on my fact-checking thread about Yale Divinity School; they're grading people on how well they memorize something that is false from the ground up, and has been since the first publication in the field.

Your Arabic instructors are grading you on something they don't even know how to teach properly.

I'm not ready to start a thread on this, I don't know enough. What I do know, is that you have to learn a language as a thing in itself, instead of as a half-assed version of something else.

I'm just saying....