El Andalous - Intermediate Egyptian Arabic, Module 1

Fossilised Rock in Sahl Hasheesh

I’m not quite sure how I end up being too busy to do my Arabic on a regular basis; I think it’s partly because I can dictate my own timetable over here and so I’m not obliged to do anything at any particular time if I decide that’s for the best. At the moment, I’m feeling motivated to work on my second novel (Space Shapes; no you didn’t miss it, my first one isn’t out yet!), so I’ve used any spare time to do that rather than my Arabic while the mood takes me.

Anyway, it’s not as if I’m not progressing at all. I finally managed to read all the dialogues in my first book in Arabic script and so I’ve moved on to the first chapter of my Intermediate book. As I said in an earlier blog, this Intermediate book is all in Arabic script; the last time I looked at it, I wasn’t able to read a thing. By the time I started it this time round, I managed to read the first dialogue with hardly any difficulty. Progress!

Fortunately, the Intermediate books starts with very basic vocabulary that I’ve already learned, for the most part (what’s your name, where are you from, the verb “to have”). It’s more thorough than my other book, so rather than just the basic “I’m from England”, you also learn, eg, I’m from North America, South West America, the capital of America (the book is by the American University in Cairo) and the names of a whole bunch of countries focusing on those closest to Egypt for the most part. For me, this is good, because the grammar is familiar and yet I still get to learn a few new words while practicing my reading.

The difficulty now in this first chapter is working out what all the exercises are since they are explained in Arabic script as well and I don’t know the vocabulary for “repeat”, “fill in the missing word”, “answers are on the recording”, “grammar”, “pronunciation”, “vocabulary” etc.

It’s easy to think that I could just look the words up in a dictionary, but it’s a skill I haven’t yet developed. I can’t remember the order of the alphabet and, because the shape of a letter changes depending on where it is in a word, I have to work out what that letter in the middle is like when it’s written at the beginning of a word in order to identify it in the alphabetic list. Even then, it's not so easy, because I can never remember which letters come before and after my target letter and when I'm looking through the dictionary when I've got to the middle of a word, I have to work out for each letter what it looks like at the beginning, and where it is.

In addition, there are a few letters with similar sounds, for example, a hard D and a soft d, and a d that sounds a bit like "th", and I have to remember which is which and, again, where they are in the alphabet, which is completely different from the position the similar letters are in my mother-tongue alphabet. It's complicated!

I started to look the words up in a dictionary thinking it would be good practice, but it took me several hours to look up one word and sometimes the word didn’t appear to be there. I was never very sure if it was because I had looked it up wrongly or if it really wasn’t in my small dictionary. Or maybe the word I was looking up was part of a verb and I needed the infinitive? Or maybe it was the plural, so I needed to look it up under the singular, but if it’s a new word, I don’t know what the singular is (since in Arabic the plural can be quite different from the singular). Alternatively, maybe it’s an Egyptian word that’s not listed in my strictly Arabic dictionary. Really, using dictionaries is a pretty advanced skill, I now realise. It’s amazing that we ever manage it.

My next technique was to use my little Egyptian Arabic to English dictionary which has Egyptian Arabic words transliterated into the English alphabet. Unfortunately, this is closer to a phrase book, really, so terms like “basic vocabulary” aren’t in there.

It wasn’t possible for me to enter the words into google translate, since my book is in hard copy and I didn’t know – or think how to fathom out – how to write the Arabic letters on my computer. As it is, google translate for Arabic is a joke. You can pretty much pick any sentence in Arabic and when you put it into google translate, it comes out as gobbledegook. Here are two comments that I saw on facebook on Esmat’s page, “translated” into English:

Any fresh mashy ya am murdoch senior wekoltli dollar on cam

Any sweet Dee I love you red mesh hataadi taking account of their path and purify your health workers Anta



Then I suddenly remembered that I’d downloaded an Egyptian Arabic / English dictionary that was online. It took me a bit of experimenting to learn how they represented the various Arabic letters in the transliteration, but once I’d got the hang of that, it worked not too badly. There are still lots of words that I am unable to find, but I did manage to get quite a few (“words”, “the basics”, “repeat”, “colleague”, “pronunciation”, “map”, “chart”, etc). It’s a super dictionary actually as it also has sound with it so that you can hear a real Egyptian speaking the words for pronunciation, and, of course, it has the word written in Arabic script so that you can check it letter for letter against your target word. Moreover, it even tells you if it’s an Egyptian word or a Modern Standard Arabic word. I couldn’t get the sound files to download at first, so I emailed the creator, and he fixed it for me the next day, which was absolutely brilliant. It turned out that he lives in Hurghada!

Another good thing about the online / electronic dictionary is that you can store words in your “learn” file and then test yourself. It’s quite addictive because as you look for the word you want, you come across other words that you feel are useful, and before you know it, you have tons of words in your “to learn” list.

Consequently, this first chapter of the new book is taking me forever and I’m still in the process of looking up the vocabulary. However, I’m persevering and taking it slowly, because I reckon all these words in the first chapter will be repeated throughout subsequent chapters; after all, the exercises ("pronunciation exercise", "fill in the gaps", "find the word that corresponds to the verb") will probably be similar throughout the book, so it should be a one-off task and things should go a lot faster after that.

In the mean time, I’m now spending half an hour a day with Ajay, who is also learning Arabic, so that the two of us can practice speaking with our limited vocabulary. Slowly, slowly….