Foundational
A collection of 3 posts
The Arabic Your Textbook Did Not Teach You
A learner can spend two years on Arabic and still be lost in a Cairo café. There is a category of Arabic that fills nearly every conversation and that almost no textbook teaches — the connective tissue, the greeting rituals, the religious-cultural phrases that carry the language.
Spoken Arabic Is Not One Language
There is a convenient fiction at the center of most Arabic instruction: that Arabic is one language, learnable from one book, the same in Cairo as in Casablanca. It is a useful fiction — and not quite true. On diglossia, the dialects, and the choice every learner has to make.