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Learning Arabic in Morocco: A hard five months
Enrolling in an Arabic-language school was the biggest challenge of my life
I’ve learnt a lot recently.
In August I made the thirty-nine-hour journey from Canberra, Australia to Fes, Morocco, making the biggest leap of my life. I had enrolled for one academic year at ALIF, the Arabic Language Institute in Fes, en route to moving my life back from Australia to the UK. After ten years working as a doctor, and concluding about five years ago that this was not the profession I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing, enrolling in Arabic school was my way of cutting the cord to my old life with its comfort and ease.
Having moved a lot through my profession — due to its 12-monthly job rotations — and having previously moved from the UK to Australia, I felt confident in my ability to land on my feet and settle into the Fes life. However, I found it almost impossibly hard.
Nothing quite prepares you for feeling that out of your depth. My Arabic was extremely basic when I arrived — limited to greetings and the bare essentials. But my simple Fusha (the modernised standard Arabic) was little help when everything was in Darija (the local Moroccan dialect). It was my high school French saved me in the supermarket, its presence in Morocca a relic of…
