The Arabic Book Written for Couples, Not Students

A phrasebook that knows why you are learning

Most Arabic books imagine a student, an exam and a classroom. This one imagines a relationship — which is why the sections are different.

Learn Arabic For Your Habibi covers the everyday ground you would expect, and then keeps going into territory nobody else prints.

The chapters other books do not write

• Ways to call your partner. Around twenty of them, well past the one word everybody already knows.
• Fighting. Because those conversations happen too, and knowing how to ask to talk calmly is worth more than another page of nouns.
• Family. Which in practice means their mother, their siblings, and the lunch where you will meet all of them at once.
• Gifts, food, the household, shopping. The actual texture of two people's shared life.

Nineteen sections in total, alongside greetings, introductions, numbers, weather, work, travel, colours and directions.

Easy enough to keep up with

No grammar drills. No alphabet required to start — everything is in clear transliteration with a pronunciation guide at the front. Replies printed beside the phrases so you can hold the exchange rather than open it. Every line marked (m) and (f), which matters more here than anywhere, because these are the phrases you will say most often.

The known side effect

Your habibi will slowly lose the ability to have mysterious Arabic conversations next to you.

Forty pages, A4 paperback, spoken Levantine Arabic, by Daria Okhrimenko. AED 169 with free delivery anywhere in the UAE in two to four days. Complete beginners welcome.

Learn Arabic For Your Habibi. There is a preview of the endearments chapter's territory in Arabic terms of endearment.