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masha allah jazak allah khayr i learned my first lesson *free palestine*

Extremely useful lesson - practical vocabulary and dialogue

This is definitely one of the best lessons. The Arabic dialogue contains a remarkably large proportion of high frequency lexical items such as "maa zaal" (still not),"lil'asaf" (unfortunately) and "la'ahad" (nobody). It is, however, a pity that no conjugation tables have been provided in the PDF transcript.

I think I ought to say something about the word "sahiieh", which occurs at the end of the first sentence. "Sahiieh" (or "9a7ee7" in the Arabic chat alphabet)is often rendered incorrectly as "right" or "isn't that right". The most natural English equivalent is a tag question. In the present instance we could therefore say: "This thing still isn't working,is it?"

Apparently the word "mouchichi" is used in the same way as "sahiieh" in Iraqi Arabic. In an article which was published in "Harper's Magazine" in 2004, Patrick Graham comments on the speech habits of a young Iraqi with whom he communicated in English. Here is the relevant passage: He followed almost every statement with the expression "Isn't that right?", a translation of the Arabic word "mouchichi", as in: "Bush said this was a crusade,isn't that right?" or "Bush said the war is over, but it is not, isn't that right?"

In German and French it is relatively easy to render words like "mouchichi" and "sahiieh". In German we can say "nicht wahr" and in French we can choose between the more formal "n'est-ce pas" and the colloquial "pas vrai".

It is instructive to compare this text with the dialogue presented under the title "Long time no see". In "Still not working" "sahiieh" occurs at the end of an interrogative sentence, while in "Long time no see" it occurs at the beginning of a declarative sentence. This shows that the word in question is capable of assuming two distinct functions.