Why I came to Egypt

by Yusuf Kocaman 7:21 PM - Wednesday, May 18, 2016 0 comments

The reason I came to Egypt, so far away from my home was for one reason: to learn Arabic. Arabic truly is a rich and beautiful language, and by rich I mean that this is a language where there is a word for “looking at someone weirdly”. I’ve seen some thick books translated into Arabic and they kinda lose that thick aspect. Arabic is a very enriched language.

When I first came to Egypt I didn’t know a single word of Arabic. Ever since that I really have advanced a lot and gotten better generally. And right now there’s less than two weeks left of Arabic classes. These last couple of days we’ve been going over the things that we did before and bow that I realize, Arabic grammar is just like math; there are “rules” and “formulas” to write and speak correctly.

The one thing that intimidated me a lot before I started taking classes was that Arabs read without “harakats” which are pretty much the vowels in Arabic. It’s like reading “rdng” as “reading”, or is it “riding”; the only way you can tell what a word is, is by reading the sentence around it or using the little amount of “harakats” given.

Despite how hard it is, it’s definitely worth it to learn Arabic, especially in an Arab country. Right now I understand almost all of traditional Arabic, notice that I said “traditional”. Every Arab country has their own “Ammiyah”, their own dialect. In Egypt they also have a dialect which most Arab movies and TV shows are in. However unfortunately for me I barely understand anyhing from Egyptian dialect. It’s almost as if they’re speaking another language. When I come back next year I hope to learn Egyptian “Ammiyah”. My biggest self-goal for next year is to be able to undersand and talk “Ammiyah”. As I said before Egyptians are nice people, and it is my role to understand them.