Learning Levantine Arabic

Introduce Yourself
1

Hi,
I have been learning levantine arabic for around a year and signed up to talkinarabic to get some more practice with listening comprehension. There’s a lot of content here, but I’m having difficulty knowing where to start. there doesnt seem to be an index page showing the posts in order, or a way to mark videos as watched. Can anyone share any tips about how they choose which order to watch the videos in to get the maximum benefit?
Merci ktiir
Gareth

2

Hi Gareth,
My name is José but everyone calls me Pepe. I started learning Modern Standard Arabic just over a month ago, but even if I have a lot of time to study, I am finding it frustrating, so I’ve decided to study a dialect. I have chosen Levantine Arabic since I have found some interesting Lebanese stuff. The problem is that I do not know where to start. I have purchased a yearly subscription in TalkInArabic today. Can you please help me?
Thanks in advance,
Pepe

3

Hi Pepe, I usually just filter using the menu on the left of the page, so starting with Beginner Essentials :

https://www.talkinarabic.com/levantine-dialect/levantine-beginner/?tag=essentials
then moving on to the Grammar, vocabulary etc

The problem is that some videos have several tags so they appear in different categories. You Just have to remember which videos you have seen.

Perhaps a site admin could add some comments about how best to use the site?

4

Thank you Gareth

5

Hello there Gareth and Pepe!
Maryam here from south east Asia :slight_smile:

I have yet to decide on which dialect to choose. I have started with modern standard Arabic too; to easy understand most arabic reading materials. However I find it extremely hard understanding and communicating Arabic when I travel to Egypt, Oman, Saudi etc, it’s like they speak a whole new language.

If you don’t mind, please do share on how you decide to study a certain dialect

6

Hi Maryam!

I am new to Arabic and I still don’t understand either Modern Standard Arabic or the dialects. I have recently chosen to study the Levantine dialect because I found a couple of webpages and a book in Portuguese (a language I speak) about colloquial Arabic written by the son of Lebanese parents. What attracted me about this book is that it uses transcription to the Latin alphabet (and a good transcription, by the way), which makes learning faster for me.

Best wishes with your study

7

hi Maryam,
I chose Levantine as I travel to the region frequently and have friends in Lebanon and Jordan, so it makes sense to choose the dialect where you will have the most opportunity to practice and talk with people.
Hope that helps,
Gareth