Welcome to the Gool blog — why an Iraqi baba built an app for his kids
Our kids understand their grandparents. Mostly. But when bibi asks "shlonak?" on the family call, the answer comes back in English.
If you're raising Iraqi kids outside Iraq, you know this moment. The language is right there in the house — in the kitchen, on the phone, in the songs — and somehow it still slips through the kids' fingers. The apps don't help: they teach fusha, the formal Arabic of newsreaders and textbooks. Nobody's bibi speaks textbook.
So we built Gool — a playful learning app that teaches kids the Iraqi (Baghdadi) dialect, the everyday words a family actually says: shlonak, khosh, yalla, habibi. Short game lessons, real native-speaker recordings made at home, the 28 Arabic letters woven along the path, and a microphone that listens to your kid say the word and hands out stars.
What this blog will be
This is a family project — baba builds, the older brother runs Instagram, and the twins write this blog. Expect:
- Word of the week — one Iraqi word, what it really means, and how your kid can use it at dinner tonight.
- Family stories — what worked (and flopped) teaching our own kids.
- Parent guides — Iraqi dialect vs. school Arabic, where to start with the alphabet, raising bilingual kids in the diaspora.
New posts every week. Yalla — let's keep the dialect alive, one word at a time.