FusHate

Learning FusHa is a lot like doing a crossword puzzle. They're both highly structured, require you to think for ten minutes before guessing at the correct word, and jotting down a total of sixty words after a day of excruciating work is considered a success. The rewards for doing well in both are also similar: hardly anybody cares except maybe your romantic partner, who is probably only being nice.

Speaking a dialect, on the other hand, gives the pleasure of real communication. And when it comes to learning modern languages, isn't being able to communicate really the entire point? People say that you can speak to people in FusHa, it's the classical root of all Arabic after all! No, you can't. Especially since it's the common transactional speech, the everyday stuff, that has deviated the most from the classical language. Compare these:

FusHa: Ureedu an ashtaree al shateerati ma'a dajaj, min fadlak.

Ameyya: Ana ayz sandweech firack.

Both are intended to get you a chicken sandwhich, and both might, but the first one will get you a chicken sandwich with a side of vicious teasing. Maybe because it's the equivalent I saying something like: "Good sir, if thou would be so gracious, I beg of thee to bestow upon me the carved flesh of the cock of the morn!"

Actually, it's nothing like that, because all of that is perfectly understandable English with one or two archaic words sprinkled here and thither. You still at least get the idea, even if the speaker sounds like a jackass.

When it comes to actual communication, the difference between FusHa and Ameyya is the difference between a Shakespeare comedy and 30 Rock - one is taught in school as something that is funny and the other is something that actually is.

I've just thought of another way FusHa is like doing the crossword puzzle: by the time the Thursday edition rolls around, it's become too hard and I give up.

This rant courtesy of the realization that I can say in FusHa that "the generous-hearted man descended from the snowy peaks to the fertile plains" but I can't ask for a kushari to go in the colloquial.