Laila Lalami posts about the difficulties of adapting to various kinds of stress and intonation in English, whether spoken in Morocco, England, or America. Challenging as English may be, and it is in some ways notoriously difficult, I like to think that it is at least as challenging to go the other way, from English to Arabic. Personally, I have only a small store of Moroccan dialect, but I know that any English speaker trying to learn Arabic is immediately confronted with the fact that a number of Arabic sounds don't even exist in English. And the differences in stress in Arabic can also be significant. I once came in for a fair amount of teasing after I said I was going to see the chicks (hamam) when I meant to say I was going to the public bath (hammam).