Sidi Bouzid Beach – Al Jadida Morocco Here we go again with another bunch of phrases. Today we will be looking at civilities. When I started typing civilities I started thinking, did I just invent a word? I wanted to say some along the lines of being civil. So I looked it up online and …
Tag archives: learning
3ammer – what does it really mean?
Here we go again with another word with several meanings. These are important as the more meanings they can convey the better odds that you will hear this word in conversation. We will be looking at the word 3ammer. In Darija this is a very frequently used word in conversations so it’s important to know …
Update on progress July 2017
So it’s the end of July and I thought I should share my experience so far and give myself a self assessment of my progress. Well it’s been tough to say the least. I underestimated how much time I would be able to give myself after work, not to mention the fact that I get …
Immersion – sink or swim
When speaking with others about your goals people (sometimes who have no knowledge) seem to always want to give you their “expert” opinion. I was telling my friends about my goals of learning Darija. Instantly they started telling me that the only way to learn Darija is to live in Morocco for a year. The …
Prepositions – the building blocks of sentences
As with other languages prepositions in Darija give information about nouns and pronouns with relation to the rest of the sentence. The following is a list of prepositions in Darija: b with, in mn from been, mn bayn between m3a with bla without qbel before ghoodam in front of teht under dyal belong to, of …
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Ash and Shnoo
In Darija there are two ways to say the what, ash and shnoo. That’s basically it, I can end my article right here. Kidding aside I did find that these words function exactly the same. There are a few differences between the two. So far I have only seen that shnoo is used in its …
The word Fayn – what does it really mean?
I was coming across the word “fayn” bzaf (alot) and the more I came across it, the more it confused me because the translations kept changing the meaning of fayn. Finally I decided to search for a dictionary. Finding a moroccan-english dictionary is extremely hard, there are not too many copies out there. I did …
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Conjugation basics (past and present tense)
I wanted to go over some of my thoughts of the conjugation of verbs in Darija. If you have some knowledge of the Arabic grammar, then you will find some similarities between conjugation basics of Arabic and Darija. For the past tense, you will be conjugating by changing the end of the verb. For instance …
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Darija Common phrases 2
I mentioned in a previous post that I would most likely be writing another article mentioning more Darija common phrases. After browsing over 117 Darija common phrases I have encountered (so far), I think that I may need to post recurring Darija common phrases articles just to keep up. We will see how it goes. …
Liya and Li
Personal pronouns are fundamental in any language. I can’t really see anyone speaking in any language without words like I, you, him, her, he, she, us, and me. In Darija to speak about yourself you would use the word liya. For example the sentence “werri liya t-tman 3fak”, translates to “show me the price please”. …