Free and inexpensive resources to learn Arabic

October 14, 2012

Arabic Sesame Street — Sesame Street in Arabic (Palestinian)

Free online resources to learn the Arabic alphabet, phrases and other

BBC Arabic: http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/other/arabic/guide/videos/learning_arabic.shtml

Arabic alphabet: http://arabicreadingcourse.com/

List of Arabic learning resources: http://arabic.desert-sky.net/links.html

Explanations of songs, dialects and other resources for students of Arabic, The Arabic Student, http://www.thearabicstudent.com/

Arabic music with English translation and transliteration:
http://www.arabicmusictranslation.com/

http://www.shira.net/music/lyrics/fromarabic.htm

Resources to learn Arabic for free
 Videos:

Sesame Street

There are three Arabic versions of Sesame Street, the Egyptian, Palestinian and Jordanian ones. Not many of their videos are available online for free. Below are links to a video for each version. You can do a search with the name in Arabic script or its phonetic equivalent in Latin letters.

I can’t find any materials to go along with it for foreigners using Sesame Street to learn Arabic (subtitles, glossaries, explanations of content, etc). If you know of supplemental materials in English for Sesame Street, please post them in the comments section. Shukran!

1. Alam Simsim,عالم سمسم is the Egyptian Sesame Street. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMt2bCCvYC8

Palestinian Sesame Street, Shara’a Simsim: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ypg3qqgENnw

Jordanian Sesame Street: Hikayat Simsim مقاطع من حكايات سمسم
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qutczDK8ScU

Arabic with Sindibad
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf5X2XmlRXQ&feature=related

There are English subtitles and a transcript, but the subtitles are only at the beginning. So you have to read the transcript to get the rest.

News Videos

Al Jazeera, the BBC, France 24 and Russia Today have broadcasts in both English and Arabic. Some of the same reports are in both languages. However, if you can’t read Arabic, it’s hard to figure out which video are the same in both English and Arabic. You can try to guess by matching video images that look similar. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a site with both the English and Arabic video side by side.

Russia Today:

http://arabic.rt.com/Arabic
https://www.rt.com/

Al Jazeera:

http://www.aljazeera.com/ Al Jazeera English
http://www.aljazeera.net/portal Al Jazeera Arabic

BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arabic/ BBC Arabic
http://www.bbc.co.uk BBC English

France 24:

http://www.france24.com/en/
http://www.france24.com/ar/
http://www.france24.com/fr/

Language exchange:

There are many websites online where you can do free languages exchange over Skype. You help the other person with your language and that person helps you in their’s. Look for an Arabic language exchange.

www.mylanguageexchange.com
www.sharedtalk.com
www.xlingo.com
www.conversationexchange.com
www.lingozone.com

Low-cost resources to learn Arabic

Arabic tutors online

They average around $15/hour. If you type “online Arabic tutors” you’ll see a whole list of them. I can’t vouch for any as I haven’t tried them.  Here are some places to look:
http://www.earabiclearning.com

www.livemocha.com

Arabic learning podcast:
Arabic Pod: http://www.arabicpod.net

Textbook to learn Arabic

Al Kitaab book and website: http://www.alkitaabtextbook.com/books/

Online resource to accompany Al Kitaab

Lingua Step, free trial http://www.linguastep.com/