A lot of times there are phrases that have 2 meanings. The first being the actual meaning of the phrase and the second having nothing to do with the literal meaning. In English the first phrase that comes to mind is “Bob’s your uncle“. The first meaning is pretty self explanatory, the person named Bob …
Tag archives: Grammar
Morphology Al becomes L
In arabic the way you denote “the” in sentences is by prefixing the al in front of the word. In arabic text this would using the letters ال in front of the word. For example if you wanted to say the book you would say al kitab (الكتاب). This was actually the first lesson …
Conjugating with Rasu
I wanted to write a very short post with conjugation of a word. I hope that this serves as a reference to those wishing to conjugate words. Conjugation is similar to Arabic where the pronoun is attached to the end of the noun. With enough practice, this becomes very easy to understand and implement. The …
Darija word ras – what does it really mean
Of all the words I have seen in darija, the darija word ras is one that I have seen used in more expressions than any other word. The word means head so coming from an English-speaking background, it makes sense that the word would have so many expressions. I’m sure we all of heard some …
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G vs Gh
In arabic there is not an equivalent for the letter G. The closest letter that resembles G is more of a sound that comes from your throat, which is symbolized (Gh). I didn’t think there was a G vs Gh discussion that would need to be made. For the longest time, In my journey, I …
Translations of 7ta what does it really mean
When I started learning Darija one of the first phrases I learned was me too. When I think back this seems to be a strange a thing to learn at first. I think that the reason I learned this first was because I wanted to know how to agree with someone. Just to let you …
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Ghadi the word of the future
In Darija when speaking in the future tense, the sentence is formed differently. You see in English, you would use a verb like “will’ or “going” to indicate a future tense. In Darija the contruction works a bit differently. When wanting to speak about future events in Darija, there is a special word that is …
Ra what does it really mean
The other day I was speaking with my fiance and told her that I would speak to her later as I had to run some errands. She then told me khod rahtk. As usual, I had no idea what she was saying. It turns out this Darija phrase means take your time. This had me …
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 …
9eddem what does it really mean
Sometime in the beginning of 2016 I was at the airport in Casablanca (Mohammad V) and was in line trying to transfer to another flight that would take me home to Canada. While in line one of the security guys took my passport and asked me: feen 9eddem mnin nta. In my mind I thought …