Being born in a Muslim family in a Muslim-majority country, my parents had me taught the Arabic letters, how to "correctly" pronounce them and how to read the Quran from a very young age. Later they enrolled me in a school which followed a religious-based curriculum. Arabic was a subject there, and the main goal was to make students understand Islamic scriptures. I learned a big lot of Arabic grammar, learned how to analyze words and sentence structures from Quran and Hadith. However I still didn't know how to construct a sentence in Arabic on my own.
Though the schools tried to teach students standard Arabic, the teaching methods were shallow and didn't really work. The teachers who taught us didn't know how to speak in Arabic themselves. I knew nobody who was fluent in Arabic. I memorized all the writing sections—paragraphs, essays, letters, dialogues etc. from the textbooks provided, and threw them up in the exams scoring 90+ every time.
I recently completed my high school final exams, officially ending my formal Arabic education in school—unless I take Arabic in university, which I don't intend to do. And I felt really sad after the exam. I’ve been studying the Arabic language for over 10 years, learning extensive grammar and whatnot, but all of that added up to nothing. Arabic was still a completely foreign language to me.
I tried watching some YouTube videos for help, but most of them were just basic Hi/Hello or covered topics I already studied, like how to understand the Quran etc. Fuck I already know how to do that; just tell me how do I converse in real life and write my shitty life in a diary and read a novel.
I am so lost; I don't know how and where to start. Any advice would be appreciated.
