Category: Arabic

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Beginner Arabic Youtube

Are you beginning to learn Arabic and in need of some fun and easy media to help boost your vocabulary? Look no further… !يالله

  1. All About Me

Tareq and Shireen are learning how to be kind and considerate friends! Tune in if you’re looking to fill your vocabulary with wholesome terms about friendship and sharing.

2. Arabic Fairytales

Arabic retellings of classic fairytales using simple language and helpful subtitles.

3. Totally Spies! Arabic

Subtitled episodes of Totally Spies! dubbed in Arabic! Ideal if you need something more sophisticated than fairytales.

4. Obayd Fox

Obayd Fox is a British Youtuber living in Saudi Arabia. As a fellow Arabic learner (albeit an advanced one), he tends to speak slightly more slowly than a native, and he usually uses الفصه 🙂

5. Learn Arabic with Khasu

Khasu is also an Arabic learner and a very talented teacher. His channel includes roleplays, skits, vocab lessons, and breakdowns of grammatical concepts.

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The Blue Caftan: A Moving Arabic Film

The Blue Caftan premiered at the 2022 Cannes Festival.

Last month, I saw one of the most moving films. I went into it completely blind—my friends had asked if I wanted to come along to a film festival and I said yes, knowing nothing about what film we’d be watching. Before the show started, commentators talked a bit about Morocco, and the history of the film festival we were at, The Cascade Festival of African Films.

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Phone apps for beginning language learners: Duolingo vs. Memrise

Duolingo: Duolingo’s app is very intuitive, is free, and has short exercises for both grammar and vocabulary for 100-level French. Structured exactly like the website, Duolingo features a ladder-like structure of learning; each lesson introduces new material based on past information. One nice feature to the app is the possibility of “testing out” of lessons, which is helpful if you find yourself bored by the current material.

Memrise: Almost identical to Duolingo’s mini-lesson/game-based platform, Memrise uses incrementally more difficult lessons with easy responses, presenting words or phrases and then asking for repetition. Some minor variations are present, however: Memrise uses short videos of native French speakers to help with listening comprehension. There is also a texting-based portion, where you can practice composing short messages by stringing together suggested words or letters. Memrise is less polished than Duolingo, and each lesson seems to introduce less material overall, with more repetition. This may be useful for learners who have a more difficult time learning new words or phrases. Memrise is free, but has frequent prompts to purchase a subscription. These can be ignored by simply tapping anywhere on the screen (other than the “purchase” button).

Visual of the Memrise user interface

Image credit: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/duolingo-ios-app-new-bot/
https://www.pcmag.com/review/356293/memrise