Three years ago, in the summer of 2008, I spent two weeks traveling around Morocco with a friend. We had both been studying Arabic and thought this would be a good chance to practice; of course, once we arrived, we quickly realized that Moroccan Arabic is so different from Modern Standard Arabic that we were better off falling back on our knowledge of French! Luckily, my friend was practically fluent and I had five years of middle school and high school French classes under my belt – not that it did me all that much good, as this trip was probably the only time I’ve had people ask me why I’m so quiet and shy.
