Language Training

  • Egyptian Arabic Dialect Course – Aims to teach Egyptian colloquial Arabic through songs. This could be used as a supplement to more formal study of Arabic.
  • Friends of Morocco – A website for those interested in (learning) Moroccan Arabic.
  • Madinah Arabic – A formal online course for learning Arabic.
  • LearnArabicwithMaha – Arabic lessons – taught by a young Palestinian woman – organized in three sections: true beginners, intermediate, and more advanced learners.
  • Duolingo – Free courses for people on the go. Memorize vocabulary, improve pronunciation and understand grammar. For beginners, intermediate and advanced levels. Uses fill in the blanks, typing, voice recording and images.
  • Loecsen – Morrocan method of rapid assimilation of the foreign languages that can be learnt over the internet or on other mobile devices. It is intended for people who want to manage in most situations of everyday life without having to go through a lengthy learning process.
  • Digital Dialects – Games for learning the Arabic language. The days and months game is in Levantine Arabic, and the numbers games are given in both Levantine Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic. The other games use Modern Standard Arabic. Arabic words are often difficult to render as transliterations in the Roman alphabet, and hence transliterations here are inaccurate. Serious students need to learn to read Arabic script.
  • Live Lingua Project – Learning materials that contain courses, ebooks and audios.
  • Unilang – Free courses, podcasts, videos, phrasebooks, games and exercises in many languages (Check under “courses” for instruction on both common and less taught languages.)
  • Open Culture – Links to various language learning sites. e.x. U.S. Peace Corps Arabic Lessons.

Grammar Resources

My Languages – Site which focuses on grammar and vocabulary. Lessons, grammar tips, vocabulary, phrases, language tools, and audio files to download.

Dictionary/Vocab Resources

  • Memrise – Learn from beginners to advanced, improve pronunciation and conversation flow.
  • Goethe Verlag – Phrase book, vocabulary, download bilingual audios, download monolingual audios.  Includes 100 easy lessons (100 lessons are free). All dialogues and sentences are spoken by native speakers. No prior grammar knowledge is needed. You can start learning immediately. Improve your language skills for work, travel or as a hobby.
  • Surface Languages – Thousands of phrases and hours of audio spoken by native speakers along with flashcard, multiple choice and language learning games. Learn colors, numbers, basic phrases, food words, basic conversation phrases and build your vocabulary.Improve your fluency and confidence through learning many different sentences in your target language.
  • Forvo – Has pronunciation examples for many different languages.

Reference Materials

  • Omniglot – Arabic page at Omniglot.
  • Arabic Learning Resources – A variety of Arabic learning resources.
  • Wikibooks – The Arabic Wikibook.
  • Transliteration.org – This page has a useful diagram showing where each letter of the Arabic alphabet is pronounced physically. That is, it marks the parts of your upper torso that should be activated for the pronunciation of any given letter.
  • 101 Languages – Includes links to different resources such as radio stations, vocabulary lessons and builder, keyboards, news, common words, translators, conjugators, flashcards, travel guides, pronunciation, phrases and vocabulary.

Newspapers and Cultural Readings

CNN Arabic – [General]

BBC Arabic – [General]

Al Bawaba – News Site. This is the Arabic page; there is an English page as well. [General]

Al Jazirah – Arabic newspaper. [General]

Al-Mustaqbal – Arabic newspaper. [Lebanon]

Akhbar el-Yom – Arabic newspaper. [Egypt]

Al-Ahram – Arabic newspaper. English version. [Egypt]

Daily News Egypt – English newspaper. [Egypt]

Al Riyadh – Arabic newspaper. English version. [Saudi Arabia]

Curious About Study Abroad Programs in Arabic?

(Contributed by Garo Moughalian and Khardiata Tall)