My personal journey into the Darija language and culture
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 …
Continue reading “Prepositions – the building blocks of sentences”
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “The word Fayn – what does it really mean?”
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 …
Continue reading “Conjugation basics (past and present tense)”
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. …
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”. …
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 …
In all languages, there are going to be sounds that differ from each other. Darija is no exception. Although Darija is mostly derived from Arabic there are some sounds that are derived from french and i’m sure some sounds may even come from berber(the language of the native people from morocco) although I am not …
In Darija I found negating sentences really simple. When I say simple, i’m speaking only about the concept of negation because let’s face it, this language is really difficult to learn. In Darija there are only 3 forms I have come across so far. If being asked a yes or no question you can answer …
Continue reading “Negation – flipping that sentence upside down”
I find the Darija dialect to have many Darija expressions and sayings. Alot of the time when hearing these phrases by a native speaker, it is spoken so fast, You hardly have time to digest what was said. I guess the trick is to just memorize the phrase so that when you hear it you …
