Talk In Arabic Blog

Here I’ve compiled a list of some common words in Egyptian Arabic that retain the ق to spare you the embarrassment of repeated overcorrections.

Here’s a short live performance Jannat gave during an interview (a snippet of the song Kelmet Ba7ebak).

Here’s a quick update on what’s been happening with TalkInArabic.com.

One of the most common questions asked by learners of Arabic is ‘should I learn Modern Standard Arabic or a dialect first’? Learn a dialect. Here’s why.

If you haven’t yet started learning Arabic and are still sitting on the fence as to whether or not you should, then this might be a good little motivator for you.

I wanted to give you a quick update on what’s been happening with TalkInArabic.com project as it’s now been up for a few weeks.

Okay, so she’s getting a bit old school now but I’ve always been a fan of Samira Said. 🙂 She’s a Moroccan singer who sings in the Egyptian dialect and this is one of my favorite songs of hers. The expression that jumped out at me when I first heard this song a while back […]

I find listening to Arabic music and struggling with the lyrics a bit to be a really effective way to learn more about the way the language is spoken on a daily basis. For that reason, I’ve decided to dissect one of my favorite songs in order to outline a few key grammar points and […]

Something that completely boggled my mind when I was living in Jordan and first began texting in Arabic was the fact that there exists an entire system for writing colloquial Arabic with Latin script plus a few numbers. This is also a very common way to write for Arabic-speakers to communicate on social networking sites […]

The easiest and most common way to talk about intentional actions is to use the word want (as you would in English). For example in the case of Egyptian: انا عايز or (past tense): كنت عايز + verb Or you could use a past + future construction to indicate a previous intention (I was going to). كنت +  ها Of […]

Zaki Shan’s one of my favourite Egyptian films. In this scene Zaki’s just been fired from his job and his seriously stressed-out father comes to the rescue to try and get him his job back. As they’re walking into the restaurant to see the boss, his dad asked him what kind of person the guy is […]

I was just watching this scene from the Adel Imam movie called Zahaymer (زهايمر). The main character has dementia and starts forgetting the people around him, and in this particular scene, one of his mistresses calls him but he can’t remember who she is. One term stuck out for me here: شقلباظ sha2labaz In this […]