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Learning Arabic

A guides to help students of Arabic.

Useful Websites

Keyboards

  • ArabiKey- Arabic keyboard with automatic diacritics/tashkÄ«l feature

Online Dictionaries

  • Aratools- English <> Arabic search function, breaks word down to root.
  • Ejtaal- Browse digitized pages of the Hans Wehr dictionary. Is less useable than a print version due to single page movement, however is more portable.
  • WordReference- English <> Arabic search function.
  • Fuzzy Arabic Dictionary- Look up words without needing to spell correctly.
  • Mo3jam- user-generated dictionary of colloquial Arabic.

Lessons

  • Aljazeera Learning Arabic- Arabic lessons for beginner, intermediate and advanced levels.
  • Khallina- an open source tool that helps teachers and independent learners of Arabic explore Arab culture. This website contains Cultural Modules suitable for beginner, intermediate, and advanced learners, on a variety of subject matters including: music, food, politics, humor, gender issues, and much more.

Videos

  • Aswaat Arabiyya- useful for language comprehension. Videos are arranged by level of study and include options to slow play. Requires updated Flash and may need frequent browser refreshing.
  • The Arabic Student- learn dialect phrases from videos in blog and Youtube entries.
  • BBC Arabic- (intermediate and advanced) helpful for expanding vocabulary relevant to current events.
  • CultureTalk- videos are sorted by dialect and subjects. Intended to reflect "authentic speech" including borrowed words and phrases from English. Transcripts and translation are provided, useful for all levels.
  • Arabic DVDs- in Advanced Catalog, search for "Arabic" as language and "Video/Film" as material type.

Audio

  • Arabic Phone Conversations- sorted by dialect, level, and topic. Includes conversation transcripts.
  • See Music on Guide for Cultural Resources for Near Eastern Studies.

Advanced

  • Arabic Language Bank- reference for Arabic academic writing with ready-made models of sentences, phrases, and language structures

Library Digital Collections