I find myself repeatedly trying to translate Darija to English word for word. I know that in previous posts I have mentioned that not all concepts will easily have that 1 to 1 simple translation but I find when I don’t know something, I always try to translate to English to simplify. to me. For example I was looking at a sentence today “hadi Muda u huwa na3s”. It translated to he’s been asleep for a long time. I had no idea what the meaning of Muda was. Based on the sentence I assumed Muda meant long time.
Upon researching this word I found that I was in the most part right. The word Muda is used to denote time or period. When used to denote time it usually means a long time. But looking at the sentence it still didn’t make sense. In my english caveman brain I went right into trying to compare it with an english sentence and came up with “This long time and he is sleeping”? Not to be nitpicking but this isn’t the same as “he’s been asleep for a long time”.
First of all the correct sentence is speaking about an action that has been happening since the past. Second the translations seem to have switched the subject and predicate. Trying to find any Darija resources online are very difficult since it is a specific dialect (and not the most popular one either). Fortunately I found something. There is a pdf online which explains the grammatical concept.
The pdf is called Moroccan Arabic and it is from the Peace Corps. I’ll put the link to the pdf at the end of this post. The document explains the concept in a way that’s really advanced but to summarize, if using a present tense verb to express duration (activity that happened since the past), you use the demonstrative pronoun (hadi) with the time expression before the sentence then connect the rest of the sentence with u (I personally use wa to connect and nobody has told me that I am wrong). Using this concept we can use other expressions as well:
Hadi shr w ana f lmghrib – I’ve been in morocco for a month
Hadi khmsa sanat w hiya tkhdem – She’s been working for five years
hadi sa3tayn w ntsnak- I’ve been waiting for you for 2 hours a long time (I think I will be using this one alot)
Word list
| baliza | suitcase |
| tabseel | plate |
| m3al9a | spoon |
| qataani | beans |
| zibda | butter |
| hoot | fish |
| theyn | flour |
| fakiya | fruit |
| zeet | oil |
| melha | salt |
| shurba | soup |
| sukar | sugar |
| shraab | wine |
| meshroob | drink |
| jazayri | Algerian |
| khayb | ugly/bad |
| khayf | afraid |
| tlmeed | student |
| sahafi | journalist |
| shrjm | window |
| 9r3 | bottle |
| naddar | glasses |
| bra | letter |