Darija Disasters!

Part of my plan on moving here was to learn the language, as I was keen not to be an ex-pat who doesn’t communicate with the locals in their own tongue. Plus, we would be employing local staff when we eventually opened the restaurant and I would need to understand what they were saying. A lot of Moroccans are amazingly multi-lingual, speaking French, English, Classical Arabic and Darija, but the main language used on the streets, in shops and in daily conversation is Darija. Darija is an Arabic dialect particular to Morocco – apparently Moroccans can understand Egyptians perfectly, for example, but not vice versa.

After talking to a few friends who had taken classes I decided that an intensive three-week course Darija, held at the Arabic Language Institute in Fes, was the way forward. When I inquired, it turned out that coincidentally there was a beginners course starting the following Monday.   

Despite being swamped with house-related tasks, I decided to jump head-first into adapting to life here, and signed up.

Monday morning, bleary-eyed at the 8am start time, I began my first lesson.

There was only one other student in the class – a 22-year-old Belgian student working on her doctorate – and our teacher was Moroccan. The perfect environment for learning quickly! The description of the class as intensive was no misnomer however, and for the next two hours we moved at frenetic speed through the basics – how to ask and reply to introductions such as my name is, I come from, my job is etc. Then greetings, which is a very involved process in Islamic culture. Apart from saying hello or good morning, it is necessary to ask after the person’s health, husband or wife, children, family and general well-being, answer all these questions – with a healthy number of references to God/Allah thrown in and then take leave of each other with many blessings and best wishes for peace and God’s help.

We then finished the first class with learning the words for I, you (male), you (female), he, she, we, you (plural) and they, with a healthy dose of conjugation 101 thrown in for good measure.

Needless to say, I walked out of there like a zombie. My brain was screaming with the overload, especially as it had been many years since university and I was unused to being mentally stretched to such an extent.

Plus, the pronunciations involved completely foreign noises that used a lot of guttural or throat sounds that did not come naturally. This was going to be even more of a challenge than I’d anticipated.

The next class was no better – 8am again the next morning – as we raced through numbers, days of the week, nationalities and their conjugations, occupations and their conjugations, and then conjugating verbs in the present tense. Hooray! Adding to my sense of ineptitude was my classmate, who seemed to pick everything up instantly, could already pronounce the words effortlessly and seemed to have the memory of a elephant. Feeling completely stupid in comparison, I was even more disheartened when the teacher moved the classes at her pace and left me flailing, bewildered and frustrated in her wake.

On top of this, we’d been handed a new class schedule as apparently the previous one had been drawn up based on only one student. We were entitled to even more hours of torture and as the first week had been ‘light’, they were cramming in twice as many hours in the following two weeks to ensure we got our full quota. My favourite day was going to be Thursday, where we had one class from 8-10.30 in the morning, and another from 3-5pm. Plenty of time in between to get the house surveyed, power connected and digest the lesson before moving on to the next session…

The third class I attended was a slight improvement as it was at 4pm, and not being a morning person I hoped that my brain would be more engaged at this time of day. It started well, with me remembering some of the greetings, and how to count from one to ten, but derailed when the teacher launched off into another stream of Arabic that we hadn’t yet learned and expected me to be able to follow. Concentrating fiercely I realised he was looking at me enquiringly. The babble must have been a question and he was waiting for an answer. Seeing my blank look he repeated the statement more slowly, and I got the first bit but then lost him. Once again it was repeated and again I had no clue what he was on about. More annoyingly, my classmate was sitting there apparently having no trouble comprehending the whole thing. “I have been studying, I just don’t understand this bit!” I protested to my exasperated teacher, frustrated tears welling up in my eyes. He switched to English and explained what he’d been saying, and surprise, surprise, we hadn’t covered it yet. How was I supposed to understand it yet, and how the hell did she already get it?

My wounded pride received a small salve at the end of the class however, when it was revealed that the Belgian girl had already visited Morocco twice before and had had lessons from a friend, plus she was currently doing a home-stay with a local family and so had been immersed in the language for quite some time. I still felt irked though – the class was supposed to have been for total beginners like myself and should have been moving at a beginners pace.

The final class of the week (Friday was cancelled due to a national holiday) passed much the same, moving at break-neck speed through more numbers, food names, meal-time expressions, night-time expressions, and expressions related to hygiene, transportation, illness, asking for help, congratulations and apologies. We also covered conjugating in the past and future tenses for good measure. The class ended on a high note however. After the teacher left the room, my class-mate turned to me and said “I think I finally understand your pain – we’ve reached the limit of what I already knew – and I can’t believe we covered three different conjugations in the last half an hour!” I rejoiced. Finally, she didn’t understand something so easily! Relieved, I said “perhaps, if you don’t mind, next week we can ask the teacher to go more slowly so we have time to go over things a bit more before moving on.” She agreed. Things were looking up.

The next day the situation improved even further, when I bumped into the director of ALIF at Café Clock. (He is someone I also know socially and I’d mentioned my upcoming scheduling woes to him earlier in the week.) He’d come up with a solution to the hectic classes we were due to start the following week. If I could get my class-mate to agree and the teacher was open to it, he would extend the lessons by another three days to spread out the hours “in a more humane fashion,” he said. Thank GOD. I had been dreading the schedule and despite putting a brave face on it, I wasn’t sure if I would cope. After a couple of phone calls, the deal was done and I was saved. Add to that a four-day break from classes due to the national Eid El Kebir celebrations and I was sure I’d be able to get back on track in time for the next onslaught.