8 Resources for Learning Colloquial Arabic

1) Playaling

I absolutely love playaling.com. Not least because the guy who built it is a really nice dude. He slept on my couch once. And the point of this piece is not merely to brag about how I personally used to own a couch.

Playaling looks and feels a bit like youtube if it were to rebrand itself as a colloquial Arabic language learning website. The homepage is rows of cards. Each card includes a thumbnail image, title, dialect and difficulty level. It’s as if the guy did user research and figured out those are the four key things I want to know before clicking on this video.

If you click on a card, you land on the player page, and if you click again, you get the youtube video embedded in a modal, where you can slow down the video speed, add English and/or Arabic transliterations as subtitles. As someone who works in tech, and builds digital experiences for a living, tip of my hat goes to this site. And did I tell what you what a nice guy Jordan is?

The video library is rich, easily searchable and includes videos across 6 major dialects, 4 difficulty levels and 9 content types. Think topics like the women motorcyclists of Marrakech, how Arabic dialects evolved, or “ever have you ever?” No, I have never served toilet water to a dinner guest, more than three cups in a row.

Those are videos I would want to watch in English. So I get to watch that in Arabic, and learn Arabic in the process? Serious gangster shit. I really wish this resource had existed back in 2008 and 2010 or 2012 or 2014 when I was knee deep in Arabic.

2) Let’s Speak Arabic — Yalla Nihki ‘Arabi (Beginner)

I first learned Arabic with Omar Othman’s Let’s Speak Arabic. That book has a special place in my heart, not least because Omar is a very good looking guy. But Omar’s brother, Tawfiq, now he is the most handsome elderly Palestinian man alive today. Back in the day Tawfiq used to teach Arabic night school classes at the yad-be-yad school in Jerusalem, while Omar taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I still love you Omar.

Anyways, this book is amazing. It’s designed for total beginners. Yalla Nihki Arabi gets you off the ground quickly by focusing on commonly used words, and that’s it. Omar drills the same critical words over and over. You aren’t going to get much nuance, though, and grammatical complexity is ignored. Personally, that’s why I love the book. Also, Othman seems to have accidentally stumbled across the spaced repetition method, although he never calls it out explicitly.

The book comes with a CD. I know what you are thinking: finally, an excuse to splurge and on that shiny new CD player I’ve been eyeing for years.

I talk more about this book in this video.

3) Speaking Arabic: A Course in Conversation Eastern (Palestinian) Arabic (Intermediate)

If you are a beginner and prefer more grammar and nuance and less spaced repetition, I recommend Elihai Yohanan’s Speaking Arabic: A Course in Conversation Eastern (Palestinian) Arabic. This 4-book series also uses a simple transliteration system so you don’t actually need to learn the Arabic script, FYI.

And, you’ll be able to make great use of that brand new CD player, because these books include recordings of the Arabic in CD format as well. The dialogues feel conversational, and include explanatory footnotes clueing readers into colloquial peculiarities. You get literal and idiomatic translations, which is nice. E.g.: “ya Abu Samir, qahwet-kom maşrube,” which Yohanan translates to “no thanks, Abu Samir I don’t want coffee just now <oh Abu Samir, your coffee’s [been] drunk — i.e., consider me to have accepted your offer and to have had coffee.>”).

Now, to get a feel for the typography and style of presentation, here’s a random dialogue from book 4, lesson 44.

4) The 101 Most Used Verbs in Spoken Arabic: Jordan & Palestine (intermediate-advanced)

This book has a special place in my heart. It’s basically 30 or 40 pages of hundreds of sample sentences using 101 common verbs, with accompanying English translations, and a full voweling for every transcribed work. This is an intellectual orgasm, to be honest. So rare to see all these pieces in a single place.

Here’s a typical example from the book:

This book also includes — wait for it — a CD. I listened to the sample sentences many hundreds of times on my commute to and from campus in graduate school. If you do the same, you’ll have programmed hundreds, maybe thousands of new colloquial Arabic expressions into your head. Can’t recommend this method enough. And all you have to do is reduce you bitcoin podcast consumption by 15% and you’ll have 85 minutes back of your life every day.

The audio makes this book so valuable. Audio is so critical to developing strong language skills. It’s because I spent those thousands of hours in my 20s listening to the CD, that now, in my 30s, I can enjoy watching an episode of al-Saleet al-Ikhbari or Shughl Arab (Arab Labour) and enjoy them, usually, unless Nikolas Khuri goes off on a Mahmoud Abbas rant, not that he’s ever done that more than 11 times: 5:30, 3:16, 1:48, 17:05 ,6:28, 7:15, 10:57. 11:30 , 4:30 ,13:38, 14:48. We get the point Nikolas, you have a man crush on Mahmous Abbas. I do too. Should we talk about it? Feel free to hit me up anytime. My DMs are always open to you habibi.

Don’t just listen, though, pause the track right after you hear the English and try to see if you can remember the Arabic. If you stumble, back up and repeat.

If you really want to take your Arabic to the next level, take these recordings, and re-produce them. This is a tried and trued method, and a favorite among the youtube polyglots: record, listen repeat. Record audio on Day 1, listen three times on Day 2, speed up the recording on Day 3, and insert new recordings at spaced intervals, continually returning to the old recordings you’ve made, but at more infrequent intervals the longer you’ve been listening to them.

5) Culture Talk Arab Levant (intermediate-advanced)

The site is called Culture Talk Arab Levant, and it was probably more impressive in 1856 when I first discovered it, but I’m keeping it on the list because it’s still got “the big 3”: audio, transcription and translation.

It includes hundreds of videos of native speakers chatting in Levantine dialects on a variety of cultural, political social and economic issues — with the full transcript of what they are saying as well as a translation to English. Although it is not free of transcription or translation errors, and it is a nuisance to keep flipping between the audio, the text and the translation, AND many of the speakers fusha-ize their amiyya — or simply speak in English with the words bus and inno and ya3ni to make their American English sound Arabized, frustratingly frequent occurrences on the website — it NEVERTHELESS has the three necessary components to a good language learning materials, edging out many of its competitors.

Ya, I wrote that last sentence in like 2011. What a beauty!

6) The Minerva Institute at Givat Haviva Short Story Collection (advanced)

The Minerva Institute at Givat Haviva has been publishing some of the best colloquial Arabic materials for years. From 2005 to 2008 they published a series of three books — hikayat al-Wadi (Tales of the Wadi), Min Hikayat al-Makan wa al-Zaman (Village Tales: Anthology of Arab Folk Tales) and Farit al-Riman:Qisas wa-Dawawi — min hikayat al-Nasawin (Seeds of Pomegranate: The Woman in Arab Folktales). Although these materials are bi-lingual in Hebrew and Arabic, they are brilliantly designed, and anyone with even a passing knowledge of Hebrew will find them useful. I just wanted to sound like an asshole with that last sentence, sorry.

The three books together amount to some 900+ pages of stories, written in amiyya, translated to Hebrew (on the opposite side of the page for easy access), as well as a full audio recording of every story, in colloquial Arabic. Dust off that CD player, my friends.

7) The Olive Tree Dictionary

Now I would like to conclude with two dictionaries necessary for students at all levels. The first comes from the pen of Elihai Yohanan, same guy who made the 4-part series above, titled The Olive Tree Dictionary: A Transliterated Dictionary of Conversational Eastern Arabic (Palestinian). Here’s a sample from the dictionary:

Yohanan’s dictionary has multiple sample sentences for most entries. It adopts a straightforward transcription system, even assigning a number to every verb in the entire dictionary that corresponds to a particular conjugation pattern in the appendix. Moreover, this is perhaps the only good colloquial dictionary which lists the entries from ARABIC TO ENGLISH (with a glossary to look up English words as well). Thus if one hears a word in amiyya — one typically has little recourse if an obviously fusha parallel cannot be ascertained. This dictionary solves this problem.

8) A Dictionary of Syrian Arabic

A Dictionary of Syrian Arabic is also a remarkable piece of scholarship. The transcription system is straightforward. And as for the example sentences, the authors went biblical: though shall be fruitful and multiply: sometimes we get 10, even 15 sample sentences. Holy fucking shit.

A simple word like dead proves to be a rich learning surface.

The dictionary, of course, does not provide audio files of the sample sentences, but still an amazing resource.

If you enjoy this piece, I made a video about these and other resources that gets into greater detail.

You can find my academic work on academia.edu and my youtube channel here. Cheers!