Grammar

Hello, I’m joining Caitlyn and Chris representing Team Fatima Zahra, the little-known (but very cool) Moroccan cousin of Maha and Nisreen…okay, so obviously al-Kitaab never gave us a Moroccan version of our favourite crowd-phobic Egyptian. And that’s probably because students of Arabic are usually warned off Moroccan, even/especially by other Arabs. The most common responses I got when telling people I was studying Arabic in Morocco were “You’re learning French,” “come back to Jordan when you want to learn real Arabic”, and “you’re learning African” (…okay). ...

Téle3 and nézel are two of those verbs that keep popping out (or if you will, yéTla3-ing, hohohoho) of native speakers’ mouths but that never seem to get defined anywhere – UNTIL NOW.

I’m going to posit that بتاع – ‘thingy, thingamajig, whatever’ – is one of the most important words in Egyptian Arabic. It has several flexible grammatical uses and is thrown around constantly; the word is especially important for Arabic learners because you can expand your vocabulary tenfold by just replacing words you don’t know with this convenient linguistic evasion. Yes, it is a cop out, but whatthefuckever! Egyptians use it copiously anyways and you’ll fit right in. Anyways. How it works: ...

A transcription of the short Egyptian film el Qonbela, with bombs, street theatre and pickles.

Today’s guest post includes a very exciting announcement made by our new friend Chris. Nisreen frustrated about the perennially high degree of humidity in her native New York This is Nisreen. Nisreen is a chronically lonely Syrian-American living in New York, with a Syrian father and a Palestinian mother. She is, in fact, Maha’s doppelganger – and Maha’s falling in love with her cousin out of sheer loneliness, and Nisreen’s parallel love story with her own paternal cousin, might well have been avoided if they’d only managed to meet one another instead of spending all their time looking woefully into a camera and monologuing about their respective misery. ...

We took a bit of a break for travel and are back with arguably the most important post you have ever encountered & maybe WILL ever encounter on this blog: proper use of popular Egyptian swear فشخ (fashkh). I’ve heard rumors that the original meaning of this word refers to the exact moment where a woman opens her legs, which, honestly, sounds about right. There are a multiplicity of forms of and uses for this word, with the basics explained below. As always with curse words, use with caution. ...

مش عارفة انام “mesh arefa anam” (said by a female) This actually strangely means “I can’t sleep.” The structure مش عارفة (I don’t know) is used very commonly in Egyptian to mean ‘cannot.’ True story: when I went back to America for a visit last year after just 6 months in Egypt, I said a whole host of ridiculous things, including “I don’t know how to open the door mom,” as well as the above. Another good one I almost said before catching myself: “I won’t know how to come to the party” (مش هاعرف اجي للحفلة / I can’t come to the party). The main idea here is, once you get to a certain point, Arabic syntax will creep its way into your native language and wreak havoc on your speaking ability, so just prepare yourselves for that. ...

أنتي ساكنة في الدقي؟ “Enty sakina fil do2i?“ Smoother translation: Do you live in Dokki? In Egyptian colloquial Arabic, verbs are often replaced with a structure called the ‘Ism Fa3l,’ a concept that I like to call a ‘Verbal Noun.’ For example, when we want to ask the question ‘do you understand?’ instead of using a verb as you would in MSA (هل تفهم؟), it’s more common in Egyptian colloquial to employ the ism fa3l (فاهم؟ – Are you an understander?) and drop the هل because هل is for squares. ...