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Levantine Arabic resources

  Tags: Dialect | Arabic | Resources
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onebir
Diglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 7164 days ago

487 posts - 503 votes 
Speaks: English*, Mandarin

 
 Message 9 of 10
21 September 2010 at 6:16am | IP Logged 
I found a few more Levantine resources, but can't edit them in above:
- Jordanian: Just Listen 'N Learn Arabic Auty, Hill, Harris, Holes
- Palestinian: Instant Immersion Arabic, Instant Immersion
- Lebanese: Part of "Ultimate Arabic Beginner-Intermediate" Living Language (Survival Phrases, 4 chapters containing dialogues & a review (mainly exercises). Designed for someone who's worked through the earlier chapters on MSA, but looks like it might be ok stand-alone.)
- "standardised Levantine"*: Colloquial Arabic (Levantine) L McLoughlin

*Claims to presents "those features of the language which would be acceptable throughout the Levant area".


Edited by onebir on 24 September 2010 at 2:49am

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onebir
Diglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 7164 days ago

487 posts - 503 votes 
Speaks: English*, Mandarin

 
 Message 10 of 10
09 October 2010 at 3:20pm | IP Logged 
I've worked most of the way through Pimsleur's Eastern Arabic I (ie 30 lessons) & found it very frustrating. It presents some words with very little repetition & I've had to repeat entire lessons to pick up a few missed words. I think I've averaged about 6 repetitions per lesson, which strikes me as wasteful. On the plus side I'm comfortable with the basics verb conjugations & the sound system & consequently (?) it seems to be getting easier to remember words.

After listening to a few of the tracks of Rice's Eastern Arabic I've decided to try it. I'd read that this "doesn't include dialogs". But in fact, the "pattern sentences" are mostly given as a dialog (or several).

Unfortunately you can't really shadow these as they stand - each sentence is given as English/Arabic repeated twice. Edit out the English & you're left with short dialogs, with the minor drawback that all the "parts" are recorded by one person.

These edited "monologues" are about 1/6 the length of the original tracks & what you get if you do this is a kind of "Assimil +/-".
plus:
- the monologues in English/Arabic for repeating before shadowing
- extra recorded material covering genders/verb conjugations & additional vocab not included in the monologues
minus:
- a lower word count (~1500 items based on the glossary)
- no answers to the exercises
- the voice talent doesn't seem to be professional, and the antique recordings were made in a room with a squeaky ceiling fan. Fortunately the Arabic speakers have good voices.

So far it seems differences between Damascus Syrian & Palestinian/Jerusalem subdialects are very minimal: a few different salutations "w" & "f" alternating in a few words, slight differences in the pronounciation of some vowels. Even disregarding the Lebanese/Jordanian subdialects, this, Pimsleur, Liddicoat & the Syrian DLI course provide a hefty chunk of material for learning spoken Levantine dialect without first getting into MSA too much.

So my plan is to switch to "Eastern Arabic" as a mainstay, completing Pimsleur & internalising the Liddicoat dialogs in parallel. Then I'll have to learn the alphabet & some MSA grammar (from Assimil/TY/FSI MSA/DLI MSA ?) before reemphasising the colloquial - probably with the Syrian DLI material.

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