Feelings and expressing yourself

One of the things I am struggling with these days is expressing myself in Darija. I can say simple things like I am happy, I am tired or I am sick but these are relatively simple and don’t really express how I am feeling with these feelings, ailments etc..  I will introduce a few techniques to be more creative when expressing yourself in Darija which will help you to put more emphasis in your sentences.

Let’s start off with the basics. The word ‘Ana’ is translated to ‘I’ or ‘me’.  To say I am happy, you will say ana ferhan. To say I am tired you say ana 3yan. Finally to say I am sick you will say ana mrid.  In these sentences we can literally translate them to I happy, I tired, and I sick. For nominal sentences in Darija we don’t have a construction for the words a, an, am. Instead, those words are assumed to be part of the noun (mrid will be ‘am sick’).  

These sentences that were sentences that describe feelings about yourself. Although it gets the message through, you may want to express yourself differently. The verb 7ss is translated to feel. To say I feel sick you say n7ss mrid (to understand the conjugations of verbs please read conjugation basics). Just like ana, the verb 7ss can be used to cover anything you are feeling (n7ss ferhan – I feel happy, n7ss 3yan – I feel tired). 7ss does help to describe ailments such as n7ss dayekh – I feel dizzy and n7ss merkhi – I feel weak but it’s not used with every ailment. For example your not going to say I feel a cold or I feel a cough.

For these situations, just like in English you will want to say I have a cold or I have a cough. In this instance you can say 3ndi which translates to I have. 3ndi is a very common verb that you will hear often in Darija conversation. So to say I have a cold the Darija phrase is 3ndi lberd and to say I have a cough is 3ndi khba.

There is another expression used to say I have. This expression uses the word fiya. When I first started looking into this word I couldn’t find the meaning but I found that this word was being used alot. I asked some Moroccans what is the meaning of this word and even they couldn’t explain it to me. The answer I was given was that they just grew up knowing they had to use this word with certain phrases. I looked into my trusty dictionary and found the following definition.

Fiya – used immediately between a verb and its direct object to denote excess, persistence.

What this means (at least for me) is  when you want to express a feeling, ailment etc… and want it to have a lingering or excessive meaning you would use the word fiya (Note the word fiya is actually the preposition f and the possessive pronoun ya).  To say things like I have a fever you would say fiya skhana, which gives you the idea that the fever is excessive or persistent.

Finally there is one more verb I would like to mention which is derr. The word derr is translated to hurt or to cause pain. This word is used often when describing ailments such as yderrni rasi translated to I have a headache but literally means my head has pain. Another phrase would be tderni yeddi – my hand hurts. You may be wondering what is the difference between yderni and tderni. The short answer is the difference is that the object is either masculine or feminine. This is something I will discuss in another post.

Word list

7lm	to dream
shrb	to drink
gas	to drive
akl	to eat
shj3	to encourage
dkhl	to enter
shr7	to explain
ta7	to fall
khaf	to fear
7ss	to feel
3mmr	to fill
l9a	to find
kml	to finish/complete
tar	to fly
tb3	to follow
nsa	to forget
sm7	to forgive
9la	to fry
qrb	to get closer
b33d	to get far
sta3d	to get ready
mrd	to get sick
nad	to get up