Dear users,
I am trying to learn Sudanese Arabic. I appreciate that this dialect is not as common as others and therefore more challanging to learn. I’m having a lot of troubles in finding good resources for listening and to consume content. There are some online videos from youtube, I also have some podcast, but unluckily the dont come with any translation and I am not at the level of translating them on my own. When I import them into LingQ, the AI just gets it wrong. The arabic transcript is wrong and also the translation is not accurate. What can I do?
I am trying to find a sudanese person/ sudanese speaking person that would like to do a language exchange with me - I can teach you English, Italian or Spanish and help you with any content and maybe you can help me translate videos and learn from them.
Thanks a lot
I hope theres somebody out there to help me! Or anybody with some ideals or resources I still havent found - I have the books, I have some websites but I am going nowhere without consuming more content and improve listening skills.
I lived and worked in Sudan and can understand the dialect reasonably well. As you say there aren’t a lot of resources available and when you import them into LingQ often the translations are a bit weird, because it frames it within Fus7a.
I have had some success in using a webpage to turn YouTube videos into MP3 files and then importing them into LingQ. I do this with Arabic, as Whisper AI (the tool LingQ uses) is reasonably good at all dialects, not just Sudani. There are some great podcasts about life, society and politics in the Sudanese dialect you can access. I am happy to share some of them.
So I would advise you that this is the way to go, and it’s what I do when trying to learn a new dialect. You can also access the DLI Sudanese Arabic catalog which has many hours of Sudanese content spoken by native speakers. I’ve imported many of these into LingQ and created a collection, though again the translation quality is doubtful on some of them.
I haven’t had too much luck in finding language-sharing partners. I do know (and use) the services of a great Sudanese guy who is on Italki for the Sudani dialect. His prices are very reasonable and he’s very engaging and likeable.
Send me a DM if you want to know more, I am happy to share my experiences.
I’m glad to see someone who is so well-versed in Arabic on LingQ. I just had a quick question. Would you download these dialect lessons and put them into LingQ, and then use Whisper AI to create transcriptions of them? Is it really that easy? Are many of these already in the LingQ library? I have noticed that the Arabic resources on the LingQ library are very slim pickings, and with it being a category 5 language + dialects, it needs a lot more content in order to be attractive.
There aren’t that many in the LingQ library, but people are trying to import them and share them. There are very few for Sudanese Arabic, but many more for Shami/Levantive as well as Egyptian, as these are more popular dialects to study.
In regards to your question about uploads. Yes, it’s that easy. If you have a mp3 or mp4 file you can upload it to LingQ and it will use the AI to create a transcript of the recording. You can then use it as a lesson. It’s a very good system. As I said, the AI is getting better at dialects, though sometimes it’ll be a bit weird, especially when using specific turns of phrase specific to that dialect. For example, in Sudani Arabic you can say something like “shnu kallam da?!”, which means “what the heck?!”, but translated literally it would mean “what is this word?!”. This is where you have to be careful.
Thank you for all your help. You blew my mind with the Gloss website, and DLI content they have on there for free. Text and audio on Gloss. I have been studying languages for probably 7 years now and didn’t know that library existed. I know the FSI paper pdf books online are not very good as most of it is English, but DLI is quite the opposite. Thanks again!