Arab speakers in general are very social, friendly and helpful so I think it should be possible to have a lot of content created. There should be some universities and institutions who are interested in this kind of content for their students, some of it already exists free on the internet.
Talk in Arabic is a nice project that has come up with a lot of solutions on how to explain and teach dialect. Some high quality content exists there as well. http://www.talkinarabic.com/
It would be great if someone could just practice some philanthropy and have for instance the lovely youtuber Maha produce some material, she is really competent and has a good command of both MSA (Modern Standard Arabic) and the Levantine dialect. LearnArabicwithMaha - YouTube
The main question for LingQ is whether the dialects should be treated as separate language or not. In my opinion I think that would be good as some dialects differ a lot and some words become false friends between the âdialectsâ. The problem with this approach is that no dialect is standardised and some are close enough to each other that they can be clustered together (like Tunisian/Algerian (maybe together with Moroccan), Syrian/Lebanese/Palestinian (maybe together with Jordanian)).
The other option is to make arabic one language continuum and be more allowing, still at least every course should clearly state which dialect it uses.
In the end, as a learner of arabic, I would be very happy with MSA to begin with (as most of the material availble for listening AND reading is produced in MSA) and later on being able to choose Egyptian or Levantine arabic as a separate language, anyone who wants to can already add material in whatever dialect they like to i.e. MSA. I know this would be frustrating to many but it would suit the strenghts of LingQ the most in my opinion.
And Steve - if you learn MSA you will be able to understand most political and economical debates in television and radio but not the every day haggling in the street. If you learn a dialect you will understand someones grandmother in a certain country but not necessarily the others. In the end you really have to choose what you would like to work on. One step at a time. You can reach a descent level of MSA in maybe about the same time it takes to reach descent Russian for an English speaker. But to learn and understand the big spectrum of dialects will be like adding 2-4 additional slavic languages like Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Czech and Serbian.
Steve, if you make Arabic your project for 2017 I could as well (I have studied it back and forth for a while), maybe it would be possible to find a few others with experience in finding and ordering good quality material? I have quite a good network of people proficient in Arabic who could be interested in creating content. With a good work-group of committed people a lot would be possible.
I disagree with love and respect. It is not about standard Arabic is the dialect of God, in fact, in schools, children are encouraged to learn and speak Standard Arabic. Those who can write and speak Standard Arabic are very respected in society as they do not just know the language of Quran well, but they speak it too! So it is not the reason you mentioned. If you read the history of Arabs, it is not new they spoke a bit differently from Quran, it is just happened the language developed into many dialects. In addition, Quran was revealed in 10 different ways of pronunciation and some different words each according to how people in this or that area say it. This means Arabs differ in their spoken language even before Quran. English has several accents and several different vocab as in US, UK and Australia. It just happened Arabic was very rich and developed into all these dialects.
All best guys, anything I am more than happy to help and thank you for being interested.
Itâs really annoying not to be able to save the word second ۫ۧÙÙ Hope the team can get to the issue by next year, when some more mini stories will hopefully also be available.
Yeah the problem seems to be that LingQ doesnât use the same criteria in all situations to decide whether two Arabic words are the same thing. (e.g. ۫ۧÙÙ vs ۫ۧÙ) I think the biggest resulting problem is that you can think that you lingQd all the unknown words in a lesson, so you click the green checkmark, and then suddenly you gain dozens of phantom known words that you canât undo. So with Arabic lessons I have to be careful not to hit the green checkmark :o
Probably the worst answer for diglossia I have ever heard. This is simply untrue. The answers lie in the western/colonial mind not being able to think in plurality: everything has to be classified into neat little chunks. This is fine for simple languages in monolingual countries but not so for many languages. Anyway long story short, learning any arabic dialect will help you understand a lot of the others (as long as you have exposure to them-like they do so in the arab world). Modern standard arabic will help you read and write. I can understand a lot of the dialects, but I cannot speak a lot of them-I can however communicate with whomever I want. In reality, there is a lot of code-switching but the way they teach Arabic in the west, this is impossible.
Yea but ever since the Quran was revealed, the written language stopped changing in comparison to how languages usually change. Most English Literature students will have a hard time figuring our what Shakespeare wrote. But when it comes to Arabic we still read a text like Tafsir at Tabari written in the 9th century, and someone who knows MSA can read it easily. That is quite remarkable, donât you think?
Source: https://www.fluentarabic.net/arabic-unchanged-1000-years/
Clearly you havenât seen enough (any?) of Vladimir Skultety. Heâs doesnât do the B1/B2 that a lot of these others reach. I think he had something like 9 at C1/C2 and has since âretiredâ.
I uploaded a bunch of Egyptian Dialect Lessons with good sound qualityâŠit appears people are using them. My goal for 2019 is to upload all 106 lessons.
What is the importance and place of MSA in the literature of your country and your society ?
And what is the place of writing dialects ? ( for instance do you use the dialect or MSA to write on the internet ? )
mostly theyâre formal and thatâs what you need as an Arabic learner.