bgha – the “two face” darija word

I don’t know why but this Darija word ‘bgha’ really annoys me. Well I do know why it’s annoying but I have no idea why it annoys me. This word bgha has two meanings. When I say two meanings I don’t mean two meaning that are similar like synonyms. The word can mean to want …

The use of shi

One word that I found very interesting was the word “shi”. As I am in the early stages of learning Darija I find myself trying to literally trying to translate every word to an English equivalent. The problem is that not every word translates to an English counterpart. Some words even multiple meanings. The word …

Possession – dyal

When it comes to expressing possession Darija uses an interesting method. Take this picture as an example. If we wanted to build a sentence using possession we could say something like: The book of the girl or The girl’s book. In Arabic we would say kitab al bint (كتاب البنت). Arabic uses the grammatical concept …

Can someone buy me a vowel?

As I delve into the vocabulary tonight I notice something quite different about Darija. They do not really like to use vowels. Now for those of you who do not know, vowels are what connect the letters together to form a word. In English, they are needed otherwise the word doesn’t make sense. It’s not …

How I plan to succeed with online resources

I figured I should explain how I plan to achieve fluency in Darija. Especially since the readers of this site are most likely looking to achieve similar results. The tough part of Darija is that there isn’t many resources out there and trying to learn in an English speaking country makes it even more difficult. …

what’s up with the numbers in Darija?

As I begin trying to study Darija I noticed some distinctions between this language and formal Arabic. The first being that Darija is a language that is meant to be spoken not read. When reading the language I immediately noticed that the English script is being used to represent the letters instead of the Arabic. …