Lower Intermediate - She goes elsewhere

The demonstrative pronoun in the opening sentence is feminine singular because ﻴﻮﻡ (day) is “ghayr (ﻏﻴﺮ) 'aaqil (ﻋﺎﻗﻝ)”.

Arabic nouns are divided into two classes: “'aaqil (ﻋﺎﻗﻝ)” and “ghayr (ﻏﻴﺮ) 'aaqil (ﻋﺎﻗﻝ)”. The nouns in the first class are words which denote humans, angels, demons or the Devil. The nouns in the second class are words that denote plants, animals, ideas or inanimate objects.

Since ﻋﺎﻗﻝ means “rational”, the two categories are sometimes labelled “rational” and “irrational” (or “non-rational”), but most native speakers of English are rather bewildered when Arabic grammarians speak of “rational” and “irrational nouns”.

It remains to add that a similar distinction is made in Tamil, a diglossic language spoken in India and Sri Lanka.

Wonderfully useful vocab! Thank you both, Ehab and Mohammed, for another entertaining lesson. And thank you, Desmond, for providing the grammatical names and background.

Could you please explain why sentence 3 begins with the feminine singular form for "weird", i.e. غريبة? Judging by the English translation, "weird" appears to be in reference to the situation as such. The feminine form, however, seems to indicate that you are actually referring to وردة.

Incidentally, the AP community is pretty hard to "scare off". ;-) Thanks for the good work you're all doing.

Actually you can use (3'areeb) and (3'areebah), it is all down to what you refer to. Here we refer to the situation, i.e the situation is weird, and the word situation can come in both feminine and masculine forms (7aal حال) and (7aalah حالة).

For the last sentence, I feel like it would make more since to say شكله انت خوفتها
rather than شكلك انت خوفتها because we are trying to say "It looks like you scared her" not "You look like you scared her."
In classical, I'm guessing we would say
يبدو انك خوفتها

@cwwolfe, you could say (شكله انت خوفته) or ( شكلك انت خوفتها), nothing wrong in either of the sentences. Just like you said the meaning changes from (it seems ..) to (you seem..) but both meanings in that context are fine.