An interesting resource for Arabic

I just came across a video by Moses McCormick who has found a website for Arabic learners. I’m posting it here because it struck me as being quite similar to LingQ in some respects and also containing some additional, useful features. Basically the site consists of a library of articles from things like newspapers in bilingual format, with English and Arabic side-by-side and including the Arabic audio. I haven’t checked it out fully yet, but it appears you can select individual words and phrases and hear them spoken in isolation to work on pronunciation. I have no idea how it deals with vocabulary and all that, but I would personally use an SRS anyway.

Here’s the video Moses has made on it: Natural Arabic.AVI - YouTube

Here’s the site: http://www.naturalarabic.com

Sorry about the link, remove the space between ‘feature’ and ‘=sub’ and then copy and paste the whole link into the address bar in your browser.

Thanks so much for this Chris - what an awesome concept!

Looks interesting, but right now I don’t want to pay for Arabic materials, as I have a lot of work in other languages. Although I will try to work on their free lessons.
Btw,ut seems that when I will really start learning Arabic, it will be already introduced here at LingQ :))

وأعتقد أننا سوف يكون العربية هنا في العام المقبل ، وأصدقائي.

وأعني هنا في LingQ!

I like the simple way in which they’ve structured the site and how they’ve got ‘HOW TO USE’ in big letter at the top of the page, with the video tutorial there and on the homepage, before you sign in to the site.

I have fount some interesting free podcasts en www.iTunes.ch.
ArabicPod-Learn Arabic + Learn Arabic Pod/ ArabicPod101.com
For mi en the moment is too difficult because may English is only beginner.

شكرا كرس! Finding the letters on the keyboard again was quite a challenge… (I like using a different keyboard for each language, the confusion tickles my brain.) Perhaps I can give my extremely dormant Arabic the kiss of life with natural Arabic. I haven’t worked out yet what Steve has said, so I don’t know whether this amazing language will be on LingQ soon, but let’s hope it.

Wow, Steve, when did you start learning Arabic??? Is that your next Mt. Everest?

Thanks Steve!!! I have been waiting for quite some time on an update when and if Arabic would be offered here at lingQ! When did you take up Arabic?!!

I have to admit that I just used google translate. But I now feel guilty and as soon as we have Arabic on LingQ I promise to start learning it.

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Ah, don’t worry about it Steve. I am excited though that LingQ will offer Arabic here sometime soon though.(Possibly)

In regard to naturalarabic.com, it’s a great site but the problem is that you have to pay to get the use of the site. So, for me, it isn’t that useful. Once Arabic is here on LingQ, I’m going to be doing a lot of learning from here once I have gone through my two courses I have.

Nick, is it that natural arabic is not useful or that you do not wish to pay?

As for me, I don’t want to pay for unknown material. Yes, they have free samples, but I don’t know the quality of the sound and the difficulty and usefulness of the lesson. For example, I would want to learn their “Beginner Arabic: The past tense” lesson, but I don’t want to buy pig in a poke…

By the way I pretty sure that their “Beginner Arabic: The past tense” is like their free lessons “Beginner Arabic: Numbers” and “Beginner Arabic: Pronouns”, but I don’t really like these lessons, as it looks like simple drills…

I am totally in agreement Rasana and I am very impressed with your use of the term “buy a pig in a poke”. молодец!

… online dictionaries everywhere. experience an unexpected surge in activity…

As far as I can see, the examples in the video are newspaper texts, so you learn to read and understand newspaper articles. This is Standard Written Arabic, which people don’t use in everyday speech. You can understand radio news and educated TV conversations, but people don’t talk like that. There are different dialects in Arabic, some closer to the written language and some very different. If you are going to offer Arabic at LingQ for speaking, you will have to offer different dialects (they are really different languages) - not accents, but the accent category could help keep them apart. It’s like offering Swiss German, Low German, Tyrolian German, Bavarian German all in one language section. So probably there would have to be the written language as well of course (like standard German).
I have spent a lot of time on written Arabic and grasped some of the grammar to be able to decipher some texts with a dictionary, but it just takes too long to progress that way. So a site like Natural Arabic seems to be quite useful for making rapid progress with the written language. But I’m unable to talk to people. It’s as if I tried to speak in Latin to an Italian or Spaniard.
I’m definitely on board as soon as you can offer Arabic!

Yes, the Arab world has what is called “diglossia”, where the language of the media and the language you read in books and newspapers (Modern Standard Arabic) is different to what people actually speak on the streets, to the extent that they could almost be considered separate languages. I posted the link because it seemed like a good resource for an upper-level student focusing on MSA who wants to increase their ability to read newspapers and understand the media.