Numbers, days and telling the time in Algerian Arabic

Numbers are where a lot of otherwise decent learners come apart, and it is almost never because the numbers themselves are hard. It is because they arrive fast, in the middle of a transaction, from somebody who has no reason to slow down, and because Algerian counts money in a way that catches everybody out at least once.

This page has the counting words, the days, the hours and the vocabulary of dates and prices. It is over two hundred entries because there is more here than people expect: not just one to ten but the shapes that come back again and again once you are past twenty.

Money is said in a different unit

This is the one that costs foreigners money. Prices in ordinary speech are very often given in a unit that is not the one printed on the note, so what sounds like a huge number is a normal price and what sounds like a small one is not. You will hear it constantly in markets and taxis. There is no way round it except to know it is happening, and the money page in this library goes through it properly with real prices. Read that page before your first trip to a market, not after.

Two and a few others are not what you learned

زوج is two here. If you learned Arabic elsewhere you learned something else, and زوج will sound wrong until it does not. This is a good example of the general rule with this library: the word that is correct in a classroom and the word that is correct in a street in Oran are sometimes different words, and this page gives you the second one.

Time is approximate and that is not rudeness

How Algerians talk about time is worth as much attention as the numbers themselves. There is a whole vocabulary of roughly, around, in a bit, after, and it is used far more than exact clock times in ordinary arrangements. A learner who only knows how to say half past three will keep asking for a precision that nobody was offering. Learn the vague words on this page as seriously as you learn the numbers.

What to do with this page

Drill numbers by listening, never by reading. Reading a number gives you all the time in the world and the real thing gives you none. Play the recordings, write down what you hear, check. Do that with prices in particular, because a price is the number you will most often need to catch first time and the one it costs you most to miss.

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