Not sure that anyone will want to follow that Tim

Good stuff. I shall check out those links.

I will.

The book I suggested doesn’t focus on ‘classical Arabic’. It contains everyday phrases which are understood by any Arabic speaker and, in many cases, any Muslim.

Most of the phrases mentioned by Tim (yalla, 'ssalaa malaykom, 'wa alaykom ssalaam, 'bikhiir, l'hamdu llah, 'baarak llahu fiik) are in universal use across the Arab world because they are Arabic and so are probably in that book.

It’s great to learn a regional dialect of a language. You can have a lot of fun with it. I have a pretty good knowledge of Egyptian/Sudanese Arab as well as the Gulf dialect but using common Arabic phrases doesn't make me (or you) sound like Shakespeare or his equivalent.

Have a great trip! (Rehela saeeda!)

Stephan

You're right that the common greetings are fairly universal, just as the English 'hello' tends to be understood across the world. And Cairene Arabic is understood to a degree in Morocco due to the number of Egyptian TV soap operas beamed over on satellite channels.

I tend to think of modern standard Arabic and classical Arabic being one and the same, and you're right, they are not, but they are much closer than MSA and Darija. Moroccan Colloquial Arabic is a world away from MSA and is heavily influenced by Berber with a similar swallowing of vowels leading to words like 'ntk'll'm' for 'talk'. Many words such as 'rristora' (restaurant) or 'simana' (week) are borrowed from French or Spanish because of the historical influence of Al Andaluse, the Spanish occupation of northern Morocco and the French 'Protectorate' of the rest. Cheese omelette is 'omleet d fromajj', cake is 'lgato', yoghurt is 'danone', jam is 'lkonfitur'.

I spent eight weeks in Fez last spring studing Darija at Alif. Pronunciation was a challenge and it took a couple of weeks before my tongue/mouth could move fast enough to string some of the sounds together properly. I never did manage learning to trill my 'r's. Annoyingly whenever I tried my Darija people would invariably respond in French, almost as a gut reaction, so I would quickly state 'anna n'gliizii' (I'm English) and that I didn't speak French which gave them no option but to give me practice.

But even then I had some failures. One which made me laugh was when I said to a petrol attendant 'llah yAaaw'n' (God help you) which is the formulaic expression used when saying farewell to someone who is working. He thought I was asking for directions to Laayoune!

__________________
"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

I love that kind of appropriation and coincidentally I just found out today that the Gulf Arabic for 'oats' is "kwaiker"!

Stephan

Even I shall remember that one