A small team in Riyadhteaching the way people talk.

People arrive in Saudi Arabia, work hard at Arabic for a year, and still cannot follow a conversation in the lift. That is not a failure of effort. It is a mismatch: they learned the written language, and the country runs on a spoken one.

Nobody was teaching that spoken version properly. There were phrasebooks with fifty sentences and formal courses with none. So we started writing down the things people actually say - in Riyadh first, then Jeddah - and recording Saudis saying them.

Two and a half thousand entries later it is a book, a self-study series, one-to-one classes and a small group of teachers, with courses being recorded. The rule has not changed since the first page: if a Saudi would not say it, it does not go in.