The memo is in fusha; the meeting it is about will not be.

Each of these settles the register question differently.

• The bilingual meeting

  Ministry and government-relations work in Riyadh, Doha or Abu Dhabi runs on two registers at once: Modern Standard Arabic for the memo and the formal turn, dialect for everything said between agenda items. Practise switching without losing the thread.

• The interview that switches

  Employers who need Arabic tend to test it in the room rather than take your word for it. The first questions may come in English; the next one arrives in Arabic, and so does the follow-up on the detail you glossed over.

• The seminar in an Arabic-medium department

  Your method has to be explained in fusha, out loud, to people who read the same literature in it. The objection comes back in fusha too, and dropping into Egyptian because it is faster reads as a retreat from the argument.

• Fieldwork and interviews

  Journalism, humanitarian work and research in Jordan, Lebanon or Egypt mostly happen in dialect, with people who will not slow down and are not there to help you learn. The transcript is only as good as the questions.

• The call, and whichever dialect answers

  You do not know which variety is on the other end until it speaks, and the line takes the pharyngeals with it. Practise the call you have been putting off: confirming a figure, chasing a document, saying twice that you did not catch that.

• Reading your slides, then leaving them

  Slides can be drafted in fusha and read aloud. The questions afterwards are written by somebody else, arrive in whatever the room is speaking, and want a figure, a date and a reason.

Corrections are aimed at the register the room will actually use.

Tell a session which country and which room, and it holds you to that: fusha for a formal turn, Gulf or Levantine for everything between agenda items. The faults that keep coming back get listed, and the list is short.

• Whether the fusha held for a whole formal turn, and whether the dialect you fall back on belongs to the country you are in.
• The idafa: adjectives stacked at the end, no article on the first term, and the noun phrase planned before you start it.
• Prices and dates, where the counted noun flips gender on you mid-figure and everything after it comes out wrong.
• Disagreeing in fusha, where the polite forms run longer than you expect and the short version lands as a rebuke.
• Verb forms you avoid — the derived stems, the hollow and defective verbs — and the paraphrases you use instead.
• The sentence you began in fusha and had to finish somehow: how to close it rather than let it trail off into dialect.

It does not know your office

Nothing rehearsed here produces the post, the university place or the visa, and this partner does not know your industry's terms or your organisation's habits. It cannot tell you which dialect your future colleagues use among themselves, or how much fusha your particular meeting expects — for that, ask somebody who sits in it. Rehearsal here is for the answering out loud, and nothing beyond that.