My Story

My story begins in December 2004. I had a huge fight with my then wife. At the time I thought that the issue with our marriage was due to outside influences. I figured the solution was to leave to another country. My plan was to try to start up a part time business, have the business grow to a point that it practically runs itself and just relax away in another country.

Now the search began to find this euphoric country. Coming from Canada the country had to be warm (or at least warmer than Toronto). The country had to be cheaper and being a muslim I would like to live in a muslim country or experience living in a muslim country.

My search led me to Morocco, a muslim country with a cheap economy and warm climate. It seemed to fit my criteria. The only problem was that the national language spoken was Arabic. I had no knowledge of Arabic but I was decided if I was going to move to Morocco I would learn Arabic.

I decided to ask to ask my friend, who was Egyptian if he could teach me Arabic. His reply was "Of course, I will teach you to speak in no time". After one lesson he seemed to have given up on me. I think it was the fact that it was difficult for me to pronounce the sounds. I then went to a mosque where I found someone who had came from the same ethnic background as me and was known to have been fluent in Arabic. I tried convincing him to teach me however he was very old and told me that I would be better off learning from a book. He pointed me out some children books that taught Arabic and I thought, hey if kids learn from these books surely I can learn from them too. I think that I made it up to the forth page of the book. For some reason the lesson wouldn't click to me. At the time I was also in university and I thought hey I should try to take an Arabic class in university. I tried and tried to enrol but because it wasn't my major I was always put on the waiting list. Then I said, who needs the class. I'll just get books and study on my own. Well, just like the children books, I got to the forth page and just found myself overwhelmed. After that I decided to put the whole Arabic learning/moving to Morocco plan on hold. After all me and my then wife were doing fine now and really I was terrible at learning this language. After a few years I ended up moving and me and my family started to attend a mosque that was close by. In the mosque they had said that they had classes to teach people Arabic with no prior background. I decided to give it another try.

The day I attended the class I was shocked. First of all there were more than 60 people in this class. Then the teacher came into the class. He was not arab. It may sound stereotypical but I was expected an arab to teach Arabic. Then the class started. The teacher started with a very simple sentence and broke it down by its grammar. He explained why sentences are constructed the way they are and how you can't really translate a sentence word by word. Finally it was starting to make sense. I studied harder than I ever studied before. As I learned new grammar rules I would apply them in the homework and make my own notes. The days went on and more and more people started dropping out until there were about ten students left I didn't care because I was learning.

The Arabic learning program was about 3 years and towards the middle of the third year I ended up getting a divorce. So I didn't really complete the program, however having completed two and half years of studying I felt as if I had learned enough to say that I knew Arabic. After I separated from my ex wife I ended up starting to talk to someone from Morocco. This in it’s self can be another story and maybe one day I will write but to sum it up I decided to visit her in Morocco. I was so confident in my Arabic even though I had never had one real conversation with another person in Arabic. The extent of my Arabic communication was just writing emails to this girl in which I would often look up some of the words but I was still convinced I knew enough Arabic to get by. Finally the day came that I went to Morocco and the girl met me in the airport. We went to the taxi and the moment she spoke to the taxi driver I realized something. I had no idea what she said. As the days went by I understood I have no knowledge of this language and it didn’t sound anything like the Arabic I learned for the past two and half years. Although the language seemed different, Morocco was beautiful. It seem to fit my idea I had all those years ago when I first was planning to find another country. The issue was the language. How could it be that after two and half years I didn’t really learn anything?

When I returned home I spoke to the teacher who said that every country in the Arab world has their own dialect for the Arabic language and the dialects are sometimes so strong that you may not be able to distinguish the language being an Arabic language. I found out that Moroccans speak a dialect called Darija which is a mixture of Arabic, French and Berber. What made matters worse is that the program I studied was a grammar intense program, focusing in only grammar. There was no real listening or speaking exercises in the program and even the Arabic grammar taught to us was explained in English!

I decided to learn how to speak and listen Arabic. After going through several classes, it seemed that anyone who was interested in learning Arabic was at a beginner level, which meant that any class I took would have to be started from the beginning, basically from the alphabet. At this time I decided to try once again to study on my own. I had made some friends over the years who could always help me if I got stuck. I also saw that Morocco was just as lovely as I imagined. This is a place I would eventually like to live in so it’s better if choose to learn the Darija dialect.

The issue I have was, how do I get myself to get passed the forth page? This is where this site comes in. I figured if I could make myself accountable to providing posts regularly this would not only help myself but help the viewers out there looking for resources or just motivation on how to learn this language. My goal is to be able to have a five minute conversation with anyone in Morocco by the end of 2017. I do plan on going to Morocco in January 2018 so I have about 6 months to accomplish this goal.