Warning! This is a LONG post. I'm going to try to give you an idea of how I learn new Arabic words. These words and phrases are all from a single episode of a comedy show called بقعة ضو (Spotlight). I'm not going to play the whole episode, I'm just going to show clips to give you enough context to understand what's going on. As far as I'm concerned, this is the best way to learn (next to watching the whole episode of course). I think the hardest part for most people who haven't had exposure to Syrian dialect (or any dialect) will be actually hearing the words they're saying. I know that was (and sometimes still is) a major problem for me. To get over that it just takes a LOT of listening to a lot of different things. Even if you don't know what it all means you'll eventually be able to hear the words that are being said and at that point you can do a Google search since you'll know how to spell the word. Even if there isn't a site that says "the definition of this word is X", and sites like that are rare for the dialects, you will have a lot of uses of the word from the sites Google returns and you'll be able to figure out the meaning, in most cases, from all the new context you have. You should be able to tell that context is my favorite word. Let's dive in!First, I need to give you the plot of the show so it's not all just random clips. This woman (Reem) accidentally leaves her phone in the taxi she took to work. She calls her cellphone from work and the taxi driver (Abu Janti) picks it up. She asks him to come by her work and return the phone to her but he keeps picking up passengers and dropping them off instead. He eventually has people calling her cellphone about work matters and he takes care of the issues. He goes and picks up her French passport that was ready, he pays her phone bill, etc. At the end of the show he returns the phone and she offers him a job working for her since he did such a good job for her. He turns down the job though because he loves being a taxi driver.That's enough for these clips to make some sense and really make the vocab stick in your head.
1. اي رد على الموبيل والله صرعنا. ولا عجبتك رنته؟ (Ay rid 'ala almoobile wallah sara'na. wala 'ajibtak rintu?) - Hey, answer the cellphone. It's driving me crazy. Or do you like its ring?
In this clip, Abu Janti (the driver) thinks that the cellphone belongs to this new passenger. However it belongs to Reem who he just dropped off at work. He says والله صرعنا which is like "by God it's driving us crazy." You can refer to just yourself as "us" in Arabic sometimes. Also, الصرع in MSA means "epilepsy", so you can remember this phrase as "you're giving me epilepsy."
The phone rings for a while before I started the clip so Abu Janti adds literally "or do you like its ring?". I would translate that to "or do you just like the sound of its ring?" to make it clearer. ولا is a common way to say "or" in many dialects. Egyptian included. It doesn't mean "and no".
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