My journey

I started learning Arabic young. A Yemeni teacher, Fusha lessons, grammar tables. I retained almost nothing. The lessons were boring and I had no real reason to keep going.

So I stopped the moment I had an excuse. My GCSEs.

Then Covid hit. I had time. I booked a Royal Jordanian to Jordan that summer. Alone. Thought a month of classes would fix everything.

Same story. Grammar lessons. I was literally napping on my breaks. I left Jordan after a month with a few words and not much else.

Jordan, 2021. Bahr al Mayt — the Dead Sea. My teacher (far left), a friend who came to visit sitting next to him, and some Syrian orphans we took out for the day.

But something shifted when I got back. I stopped trying to learn Arabic and started asking why I actually wanted to.

Islam. Everything was revealed in Arabic. Leaving that on the table felt like leaving a deeper connection to God on the table too.

My friends. Most of them are Arab. When they spoke in Arabic I was on the sidelines. I wanted in.

In 2023 I had a cafe. Most of my regulars were Khaleeji. I picked up a lot of culture and language just from being around them. One of my staff only spoke in the Kuwaiti dialect. I had no choice but to pick things up. That forced, situational learning taught me more than any classroom ever did.

The real turning point was dropping Fusha altogether and going straight into dialect. I wanted to build the brain structure of a native speaker first. That dropped the anxiety. I started enjoying it. The science backs this up. Read Krashen.

Today I understand most conversations comfortably. Arabic in the Middle East no longer sounds like noise. It makes sense.

I want to share what I have learnt along the way. One of the people I learnt most from is Dr Saddam Alhamoud, an Arabic language specialist from Saudi Arabia. We worked together building the Arabic language programme at the Quilliam Institute for Arabic Studies in Liverpool. His insights are woven through everything here.

That is what talkthegulf is. Everything I wish existed when I started.

Hamzah