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Khaoula grew up in Tunis switching between Tunisian Arabic, standard Arabic, French and English, sometimes inside a single sentence, and nobody around her thought that made them multilingual. It was just how people talked in a country she describes as a train station, where everyone who passes through leaves something behind. In this episode of Connected By Language, our first dedicated to the Arabic language, she takes us from an early childhood in Sarajevo, where her family made lifelong friends without sharing a common language, to Berlin, where she has lived for thirteen years. There she paid for her studies by interpreting for refugees while her own German was still a work in progress, and started a law degree in German before realizing that legal German was a different language altogether.

Then she gives us a guided tour of Arabic itself: an ocean from the outside, a carefully built architecture from the inside. Three letters form a root that grows into book, writer, library and office. Love alone comes in dozens of shades. And the dialects differ so much that North Africans and Levantines happily tease each other about how they sound. Khaoula also explains why she can understand Maltese without ever studying it, why she wishes Tunisian schools had taught her Amazigh, the native language of North Africa, and why, after all the languages that opened doors for her, Arabic remains the language she comes home to.

About the guest: https://www.linkedin.com/in/khaoula-ben-el-hadj-508a7325a/

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Tandem is a global language exchange app on a mission to connect the world through languages. Members build confidence and improve their language skills through real life conversations with native speakers in 1:1 chats or live audio rooms.

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0:00 Intro

0:45 Growing Up Where Languages Blend

15:59 A Guided Tour of Arabic

37:21 Never Having Learned How to Learn

1:10:35 What Arabic Gave Her

🌟 What topics/language should we explore on the next episode of the new tandem podcast? Let us know in the comments!

Thanks for watching Connected By Language: Polyglot Interviews, the new Tandem Language Exchange Podcast.