Flashback - Starting to Learn Egyptian Arabic

I started off in life enjoying learning languages. I remember as a child having an ABC poster of basic French words (one word for each letter) and getting them confused with the English. And my original plan at university was to study French and German (it changed to German and Philosophy).

So, I am quite excited at the prospect of learning another language; it's like a return to my roots. Until now, I'd thought I no longer had the energy to start learning something from scratch; it all just felt like too much effort. Now, however, I'm all fired up, inspired no doubt by the fact that I'm actually going to live in the country; also, I'm acutely aware that if I don't want to be completely conned in the Egyptian markets, I will have to have a grasp of the language, whether I like it or not. Language is power.

I've never self-taught a language before. I started off going to various free websites and YouTube videos - some of which were quite funny. There was one with a guy telling you all the words a certain word could get confused with and by the end I just didn't have a clue. Another one gave all the words with Allah in them, but half-way through she kind of forgot what she had or hadn't said.

In the end, I was completely undecided about what I should learn first. Should I learn to read the Arabic script first or should I start by drilling in a few key phrases? Should I get a hold of the grammar first and hang the words on that, or do I learn everything by heart and pick the grammar up as I go along?

It became clear that I needed a structure more than anything else and so I settled on the old-fashioned approach of using a hard-copy teach-yourself book with accompanying CDs .

I'd completely forgotten how daunting it is to start learning a language where you really have no clue. All I could hear was a strange bunch of sounds that were totally unfamiliar and had no beginning or end. They were all just mashed together. How on earth was I supposed to learn that? Maybe I was getting too old for all this?

The first chapter taught you to say hello, but it wasn't so easy - you can be confronted by good morning, good afternoon, hello and each is followed by a different answer and apparently these were just a few to start off with. The Egyptians have a multitude of ways to greet each other. At the start, so very much was just rote learning, I just couldn't get those sounds sorted out in my head. How on earth was I going to learn this language when even "hello" appeared to be beyond my capacity?

But after the first two chapters, I started really enjoying it. Each chapter presented me with a surprise:

•  Arabic doesn't have the verb "to be", you just say "the table clean"
  (this seemed quite logical when I thought about it, do we really need to clutter our language with a verb as well?)
• Only the numbers 3-10 are followed by the plural - all other numbers are followed by the singular
  (eg, thirteen duck but nine ducks - now how weird is that?)
• Arabic script is written like texting - with the short vowels left out completely
  (and I thought writing "txt msg" was a modern phenomenon)
• The plural forms of the noun generally have to be learnt separately from the singular (eg, shohka is fork and shuwak is forks) and the masculine and feminine forms for colours can be completely different (eg, "black" pertaining to a masculine noun is "iswid" but becomes "soda" when pertaining to a feminine noun)
  (at this point, I thought I may as well give up)
• Arabic is like German and says the number 23 as "three and twenty" (and not as "twenty three" as in English)

All this and I've only reached Chapter 5!

I had hoped to have finished the basic Egyptian course before I left, but, like everything else, it got a bit derailed (to say the least). But one day, I promise you, I will be back on track.