I feel I owe all the followers of this site an apology as I’ve been so slack lately about posting, but I’ve been propelled back into action by some great news: We Love Arabic has been chosen to feature in leading UK tutoring company Tutorful’s editorial: The Expert Guide to Learning Arabic: Tips and Tools for 2018. It’s a real honour to have this website included in Tutorful’s round-up of the top learning tools and inspiring content for Arabic learners, an impressive overview which covers the best Arabic learning apps, blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts and books (although I don’t fully ..read more

If, on the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, you’d like to read more fiction from Palestine and Israel (in English), here are a few suggestions for readers short on time.  The first two are particularly suitable for teenage readers and students of Arabic at A-level who would like to read a short novel in Arabic alongside the English version. Where the Streets Had a Name by Australian Palestinian author Randa Abdel-Fatah. This great novel about 13-year-old Hayaat is available in Arabic as حينما كان للشوارع أسماء. “There are a lot of things I admire about this book but it ..read more

Very pleased to come across this detailed and very encouraging guide to mastering spoken Arabic: https://betterworld2100.me/2016/04/27/20-strategies-for-becoming-an-extremely-high-level-arabic-speaker/. I particularly like that Nathan starts out by confronting the arbitrary Ammaya/Fusha divide – it’s a convenient division for academia but in real life, things are more muddled than that, learning Arabic really means learning standard Arabic and a dialect (or simplified version of a dialect) at the same time. When I’m teaching Arabic to beginners, I teach both right from the start, and in my exp ..read more

It’s 18 December and it’s World Arabic Day! To celebrate, here’s a 4 minute video packed full of great phrases and handy facts about our favourite language. You can turn on subtitles in English, although they’re a bit dodgy and don’t always make sense. See what you can understand without them  .اليوم هو18 كانون الأول / ديسمبر وهو اليوم العالمي للغة العربية !مبروك More great resources if you’d like to know more about Arabic: * Arabic: more accessible than you think – my piece about Arabic on the British Council blog * Arabic resources on ..read more

In no particular order, here are my 10 favourite online resources for learning the spoken Arabic of the Levant (Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Israel and Syria). Below are a bonus few recommendations of resources you can buy, too. 1. Jordanian Arabic audio course from NMELRC.  Great, simple & v useful dialogues with Ammani locals involving an Australian lady with excellent pronunciation. I’m gradually making some worksheets to accompany these and make them a little more accessible, as there are no transcripts provided. For each of the 8 dialogues there is an accompanying vocabu ..read more

This is from the brilliant Aamiya Arabiya series on YouTube – short videos which provide a nice intro to Jordanian and Lebanese colloquial Arabic What is the plural of the word مكان (place)? What is  البحر الميت? Fill in the gap with one of the comparative adjectives below: هو … نقطة في العالم أكثر ملوحة – saltiest أعمق – deepest أخفض – lowest أجفّ – driest 4. What is المدرّج الروماني? 5. She says it’s أي شاء كتير أثري. What does she mean? 6. What is Hashim’s? 7. What 2 other places should you visit? (they’re not restaurants ..read more

Thank you Summer over at Foreign Language Arabic blog for highlighting this wonderful series of colloquial Jordanian clips on YouTube. It’s called Aamiya Arabiya and it features young Jordanians talking about everyday subjects such as going to the cinema, using social media, their daily routine, their family, favourite foods etc. I’ve been teaching with a few of them and over the next few days/weeks I’ll be posting some of the resources I’ve made to go with them. This is Hiba talking on the phone with a friend. I think she’s talking to someone Egyptian because at the beginn ..read more

This kids’ song by Lebanese pop singer Nancy Ajram is great for learning with your little ones but is also perfect for adult beginner learners of colloquial Levantine Arabic, as it’s full of useful everyday verbs. Shatir is what you’d say to a child to mean ‘well done’ or ‘clever girl’ or ‘nice job’ etc. Literally it means ‘clever’ or ‘smart’. We hear the same structure repeated throughout, using present tense verbs and the relative pronoun ‘yalli’ = he who. This word ‘yalli’ can also be pronounced ‘illi’ and in fusha it is iladhi الذي. Note the silent  ..read more

Here’s the link to an article I recently wrote for the British Council blog series about world languages: Arabic – more accessible than you think. Enjoy and please do leave a comment. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts ..read more

I’m preparing to teach an intensive colloquial Arabic course starting in November, so you may hear more from me again in the coming weeks as I delve back into my teaching archives and shake off old worksheets that I haven’t touched for almost 18 months. Looking forward to getting back into it. Particularly excited that my student wants to focus on Levantine dialect, with a concrete goal of wanting to be functionally conversational after two months. We’ll see what happens! It’s very hard to know precisely what kind of level a course like this will result in as so much depends on the student’s p ..read more