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Franko. Not David or James, but Arabic. 

I was going to talk about food because, ya know, thanksgiving. But I think that in order to talk about that, I have to talk about franko and Arabic. 

I shall begin with an anecdote. Yesterday, our English teacher said that today's exam would be postponed. So naturally I went home and didn't study. When I got to school today, everyone was studying. The test was un-postponed. So someone told me to ask my friend to add me to the group chat. I was like "alright" so I did. She tells me that it'll all be in Arabic and I won't understand anything. And I said that it's fine and to add me anyway. 

No. No. No. Big mistake. Bad Corie. Now I get text after text that I don't understand. I mean I already knew group chats were bad. They can freeze your phone if you don't check for a while and next thing you know you have 23455 unread texts. But then you get into one that you don't even understand the language. 

You may know Arabic as انا اسمي كوري but sometimes Arabic looks like this: 

Wnty malk anty bosy ya corie anty to go steeerat kda zy manty w t5osshy men rerrturn w htl2y pyramidsss asdk. 

Which one looks more foreign, I don't know. The second one is called franko. They used English letters but Arabic words. There are also letters that don't have English equivilents so they use numbers 

3 = ع = aa (kind of a throaty sound)

3' = غ = gh (really hard sound to make. Basically clearing your throat)

7 = ح = h (but from deep in the throat like a dragon)

5 = خ = kh (more clearing your throat)

2 = ء = I don't even know how to describe it in writing. 

So naturally I'm very confused when my phone looks like this : 

But here's what I did. I googled "essential words and phrases in any language" and it came up with this website "fluent forever" and a 625 word list. So I wrote all of them down and I'm still in the process of translating them into franko with the help of my friends. 

Then I will memorize them, make sentences and hopefully soon I will be able to understand a little more. Learning a language without a class is really hard guys. But the number one reason I came to Egypt was to learn Arabic and I will. 

People asked me when I was translating the words, "why do you want to learn these?" I never had a good enough answer. But here it is: I don't care if I never use this word. But at least I'll know it. Even if memorizing these words doesn't help me understand y'all it gets me that much closer fluency. I don't care if it takes me the rest of my life to become fluent in Arabic. I will become fluent in Arabic or I will die trying. 

Tweet version of this post 

@corieinegypt (still not a real twitter):

Sometimes people use English letters and numbers to communicate in Arabic and it's weird. Also I WILL become fluent in Arabic. #franko

Stay beautiful. 

Byeeeee

Corie.