Some ways to say ‘still’. لسا lissa Clearly derived from lissaa3a ‘up to now, up to this hour’, this is the most common word (along with various regional variations such as اسا issa etc). Works for most uses of ‘still’ in English (as well as ‘yet’): لسا ما اخدت قرار léssa maa 2akhad@t qaraar I still haven’t made a decision I haven’t made a decision yet لسا ما مبين léssa muu mbayyen It’s not clear yet ...

This is another one of those tricky constructions – ‘I was so tired that…’ that we like a lot in English but that it’s not immediately obvious how to form in Arabic. There are basically two ways to do it which I’m going to cover briefly in this post: لدرجة انو la-darajet 2énno This literally means ‘to such a degree that’, and it’s used pretty straightforwardly: وعندو المسلسل فانز لدرجة انو مستغني عن حبك w 3éndo lmusalsal faanz ladarajet 2énno mésteghni 3an 7ubbak … and the series has so many fans that it can do without your love ...

All of the videos we’ve looked at so far, with the exception perhaps of that Camel song everybody liked so much, have been from TV and have represented a kind of scripted conversational language which represents more or less (minus the drama) the way that people speak in normal everyday situations. Obviously this is important – if you’re going on a year abroad, or want to learn Arabic to communicate with people in normal situations, this is the kind of language you need to become familiar with. ...

With some new stuff about participles, verbs etc: here Fusha to Shami

This is a post about some ways to say ‘seem’ and express conclusions about people without saying يبدو (although as with many fuSHa expressions this does sometimes appear in speech as a more formal alternative to the phrases given below). كإنو ka2énno This word literally means ‘as if’ (like the fuSHa ka2anna) and is one of the 2ukhawaat 2inna, which in 3aammiyye basically means you can attach pronouns to it (ka2énni, ka2énnak…). Like 2énno, however, the third person masculine form (ka2énno) often appears regardless of the gender and number of the subject. It can also appear quite freely in different positions, including at the end of a sentence and on its own. Its use in the meaning ‘as if’ was covered in this post. ...

Talking to people on the phone can be difficult enough in English, especially if you’re a millennial who barely remembers when you still had to pay for individual texts and didn’t have 3G everywhere. Doing it in a foreign language is notoriously even more difficult. By special request, then, here’s a few key pieces of vocabulary/expressions for speaking over the phone, along with a gif of Drake speaking Arabic over the phone (accuracy not guaranteed): ...

This is just a quick one but a surprisingly complicated topic – different words for ‘hot’ and ‘cold’. Syrian Arabic has a surprisingly large inventory of different words for these two concepts. Weather is described as شوب shoob ‘hot’ or برد bar@d ‘cold’. You probably know these two, but you might not realise that they’re not adjectives but nouns. They most commonly appear in the éddénye X construction described by Caitlyn here and by me here – literally ‘the world is heat’, ‘the world is cold’. You can also use them as normal nouns in contexts like ما بحب البرد ‘I don’t like the cold’ or الشوب بنعسني ‘hot [weather] makes me sleepy’. ...

A more detailed, clearer guide on participles: Team Nisreen’s Participles

تاني taani taani is one of the first words you’re introduced to in a colloquial course, and I think is pretty much omnipresent in dialects in the meaning ‘other’ alongside its original meaning ‘second’. It often appears with indefinites in the meaning ‘else’: مو محتاج كون واحد تاني وانا معها ولا محتاج حدا تاني وهي معي muu mé7taaj kuun waa7ed taani w-2ana ma3a wala mé7taaj 7ada taani w-hiyye ma3i I don’t have to be someone else when I’m with her and I don’t need anyone else when she’s with me ...

Team Nisreen’s Fusha to Shami