The Arabic you studied is not the Arabic the taxi driver is speaking.

All of it is settled in dialect, and none of it lasts a minute.

• Agreeing the fare first

  The negotiation happens before the car moves, in dialect, with numbers. Practise saying a price, refusing a counter-offer once without ending the conversation, and catching the figure that comes at you said the local way rather than the fusha way.

• At the pharmacy

  Bodies are where fusha and dialect part company hardest: what you learned as ma'ida is batn to everybody behind the counter. Say what hurts, since when, and what you already take at home, to someone who will answer in the local words.

• Which Arabic, which country

  Egyptian and Levantine travel well because of decades of film and television. Maghrebi Darija runs one way: Moroccans and Tunisians follow the eastern dialects, and easterners often cannot follow Darija at all. Pick the variety of the place you are going to.

• Questions about you, at a border

  Border officers, hotel desks and checkpoints want to know where you are staying, who with, how long and why. It comes in dialect, and it is repeated in fusha only if you look lost, which is an answer of its own. Practise your own plans in one breath.

• The set responses

  Arabic hands you a fixed reply for the offer, the thanks, the blessing and the goodbye, and there is a right one for each. Using none of them reads as cold; inventing your own reads as odd. Practise until the response arrives before you have thought about it.

• The switch to English

  In Dubai, Amman or Cairo one hesitation is enough for the other person to change language, and the practice you came for is over. Getting to a second sentence quickly is what keeps the exchange in Arabic.

Travel Arabic is dialect, and dialect is mostly listening.

Say where you are going and the session picks the variety — Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf or Maghrebi — and corrects you inside it. Most of the work is on the ear, because the things you have to say are few and the things said to you are not.

• Figures as the dialect says them, not as fusha says them: prices, times and room numbers, each said once.
• Listening more than speaking — the qaf as a glottal stop in Cairo and Beirut, as a hard g in the Gulf.
• The jim: a hard g in Cairo, a soft zh in the Levant, and the same written letter throughout.
• 'Again, slower' in the local dialect, because asking for it in fusha is what makes people switch to English.
• Directions in the answer, not the question: left, right, past the mosque, after the second roundabout, at speed.
• Greetings that come in pairs: each one has a fixed answer, and the silence where the answer goes is heard.

It speaks a taught dialect

A few sessions will not make you conversational in a variety you have never lived in. The Egyptian or Levantine here is the broad, media-shaped kind that travels; a market in Fez or a village outside Sohag sounds like neither, and slang moves faster than any tool follows it. The habit it can give you is opening your mouth first and being corrected afterwards.