Okay, I may be jumping the gun on this, but I wanted to, at the very least, put it out there. I’m doing this because I’ve noticed that lots of people have requested wanting to learn Arabic.
Basically, I was recently approached by a LingQ Member and asked to record something that this member has written out in Arabic. I found the process very easy, only taking me a few minutes. I uploaded it then… voila! I’m not trying to outsource or make members go elsewhere, so I’m not even going to mention what website I posted it on. However, I wanted to ask if anyone had any content they wanted me to record. Again, with MSA (Modern Standard Arabic) I don’t have an accent because it’s formal Arabic; if you really get into it, there are extremely precise rules to pronounce each and every single letter. Normally, however, people sound quite similar to each other. You might be surprised, but I’ve seen tons of non-native speakers who speak MSA without a noticeable accent at all. However, in terms of the dialects, this is extremely difficult. I’ve been speaking SCA (Syrian Colloquial Arabic) for my whole life. In fact, they were the first words out of my mouth when I started speaking, yet to the natives I still have a slight accent when I go and visit Syria because I grew up in the US.
In terms of Arabic content, I can begin, at the very least, by recording some dialogues if anyone has any so that, when LingQ is ready for Arabic, I can begin uploading them as lessons and have a large collection of things that interest people.
I don’t have enough time to create content now, but if someone provides me with it (maybe something they find in a book, an article, a conversation), again, I don’t mind recording it. Or perhaps people can start to provide me with ideas of basic things like asking for people’s names or how they’re doing. I’m more hesitant about the last one because I think it might be appropriate to, perhaps, repeat it using several different ways, and I don’t yet have a female to help me record, which is important for conversations. There is the singular masculine, singular plural, dual masculine, dual plural, and plural masculine, plural feminine, so there’s tons of ways that these can switch up. Perhaps it’d be best to first focus on singular masculine and singular feminine, but, still, I don’t have a female to record with me (though I could try asking any one of the Egyptian girls I see here on a regular basis to help with a dialogue or two).
Sorry for the tangent. So, yea, just let me know because I really would like to start offering more content. At the very least that will be a quick place to guide people. I’m asked countless times of how to approach the Arabic language. I don’t believe that most of the books available for learning the language, the mind-numbing exercises, nor the university classes are the most efficient way. Doing this will make it easier for me to just tell people, “join LinQ! There’s tons of content there.”