A language learners’ forum

Here's a list of resources for learning Levantine Arabic. Feel free to comment if you have any suggestions, and I'll be sure to add them to this list.

I have posted links to Amazon and other websites where you can order the resources that are not free, since doing otherwise would be against the forum rules, but if you're a pirate, matey, with a bit of snooping around you'll find the treasure you're looking for.

COURSES:
DLI Syrian Arabic
DLI Levantine - Headstart
Colloquial Arabic - Levantine
Cours D'Arabe Palestinien Vol 1
Cours D'Arabe Palestinien Vol 2
Eastern Arabic by: Frank A. Rice and Majed F. Sa'ed
Syrian Colloquial Arabic - A Functional Course
Levantine Arabic For Non-Natives
Pimsleur - Eastern Arabic
FSI Levantine Arabic - Pronunciation Course
Speaking Arabic (Palestinian)

DICTIONARIES:
The Olive Tree Dictionary of Eastern Arabic
A Dictionary of Syrian Arabic

GRAMMAR BOOK(S):
A Reference Grammar of Syrian Arabic

TV, YOUTUBE CHANNELS, WEBSITES, PODCASTS:
Hay il-Matar (حي المطار) Syrian radio drama - 150 episodes of pure dialogue with excellent sound quality.
DLI Arabic Phone Conversations
GLOSS - Click on "Arabic - Levantine".
Soft Thorns - A Syrian TV show with English subtitles.
Khwatem - Syrian TV show
Fee Zooroof Ghameda - Syrian TV show
Itiham - Lebanese? TV show
Learn Arabic Naturally
MTV Lebanon
Roya TV - Jordanian.
Female Show - Jordanian
Roya Comedy
Roya Drama - A lot of Jordanian TV shows here.
Roya Music
Hyperlink Podcast - A podcast about technology. I believe it was discontinued, but I'm not sure.
Culture Talk Arab - Levant
Addounia TV Live - Syrian
RTV Drama - Syrian
Sama TV - Syrian
Revolutionary Arab rap: The Index - Lyrics and translations of Arabic rap songs.

Another excellent resource, more comprehensive than some of the others cited, is the four-volume, plus audio, set "Speaking Arabic", published in Israel and dealing with the Palestinian dialect. It's available on Ebay and on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Speaking-Arabic- ... ing+arabic
and here's the website from the publisher, which offers some samples: http://www.minerva-books.com/products/s ... c/?lang=en

Daristani wrote:Another excellent resource, more comprehensive than some of the others cited, is the four-volume, plus audio, set "Speaking Arabic", published in Israel and dealing with the Palestinian dialect. It's available on Ebay and on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Speaking-Arabic- ... ing+arabic
and here's the website from the publisher, which offers some samples: http://www.minerva-books.com/products/s ... c/?lang=en

Thank you. I've added it to the list.

Further to the above, I see that Georgetown University Press has put the audio to their book "Eastern Arabic" online for free download at the following site: http://press.georgetown.edu/book/langua ... ern-arabic

(Go to the left of the page where it says "Explore this title" and the audio files are available just below marked as "pronunciation", "units 1-9", "units 10-19", and "units 20-30")

In recent years, Georgetown has sold the book along with the audio, but when it was first published, the book was sold separately and the audio, then on cassette tapes, was quite expensive. I suspect that a fair number of libraries may have copies of the book, but possibly not the audio, so the free availability of the audio is a welcome development.

Hello,


Below is a link for the audio of "A Course in Levantine Arabic" by Ernest McCarus. The book is already available around the net.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/j48vs07qatz30fe/AAB4bewBwIiAFuD58wJSEq6ma?dl=0

A resource I use is http://www.talkinarabic.com/ It is a great website for video lessons, but it comes as a subscription.

Hey, I have registered just to write here.
You need to add:

"Keefak" – a good smartphone app for learning Lebanese (it comes with transliteration only but it's good anyway to pick up some vocabulary),

The Living Arabic project dictionary, a great online vocabulary for both Egyptian and Shami dialect: http://www.livingarabic.com/levantine-a ... ionary.php,

and to the book list "Teach yourself spoken Arabic" by Omar and Khaled Nassra (they also have a website called nassraarabicmethod.com): http://www.lulu.com/shop/khaled-nassra/ ... 29814.html. There is no audio and this is quite a big problem, but the first part is a good short introduction to the grammar of Levantine Arabic and there are some good dialogues.

"Mamnou3", a satirical Lebanese series with English subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/user/MAMNOU3tube

ع كل حال شكرا كتير يا رفيقي
this is the best list i've seen so far!

Ciao

A couple more resources:

The Lingualism company publishes some very useful books for Arabic dialects, including Egyptian, Levantine, and Tunisian (so far), as well as learner's dictionaries. The dialect books are not textbooks, but rather books on verbs, vocabulary, readers, etc. Some come with audio. The website is at: http://lingualism.com/

Another book/audio combination dealing with Levantine is: Breakthrough Arabic, a book with cassettes.
https://www.amazon.com/Breakthrough-Ara ... ugh+arabic

Of the materials I've seen, my personal pick for the most complete and ambitious introduction for beginners is still Speaking Arabic, by J. Elihay, listed above.

Are any of these courses particularly "shadowing" friendly? I'm trying to find something that fills the Assmil/Linguaphone void but everything I've found is for MSA or Egyptian :/

Materials for Shadowing
My experiences with “shadowing” suggest that this technique works well with materials containing collections of dialogues, narratives, and/or sentence-pattern drills, for which audio recordings are available. This could even include audio books, videos, and many other materials; one merely needs to be creative. Fortunately, many language courses, such as Assimil, Linguaphone, and numerous others, incorporate such features. So then, to a large extent, almost any set of materials which proposes to teach Levantine Arabic, or provide exercises for speaking it, should meet your needs.

Arabic (Levantine) Materials
Now then, although I have never studied Arabic, were I to do so, and should I wish to select materials from the lists above for the purposes of shadowing, I would consider the following:

DLI Syrian Arabic
Although this course might be somewhat out-of-date particularly as to colloquial usage, I would assume that the basic structure of the language has not evolved very far from what this basic introduction to the language presents. Out of curiosity, I downloaded it from the Yojik.eu website. This is a “big” course with lots of opportunities for practicing the language!
https://yojik.eu/languages/DLI/DLI-Arabic-Syrian.html

FSI Arabic (Levantine) Introduction to Pronunciation
Do you need to “shadow” these exercises? Probably not, but repetition of the drills should be beneficial.
https://yojik.eu/languages/FSI/fsi-levantine-arabic.html

Breakthrough Arabic / Just Listen 'N Learn Arabic by Nadira Auty, Brian Hill, et al
These courses are the same, under different titles. First, I would adopt any of Daristani’s suggestions blind-folded! Second, having worked quickly through the complete set of these materials for the self-instruction of German, I can confirm that they would be quite useful for shadowing and for ear-training.
https://www.amazon.com/Breakthrough-Arabic-Nadira-Auty/dp/0333516117/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1505597654&sr=8-1&keywords=breakthrough+arabic
https://www.amazon.com/Just-Listen-N-Learn-Arabic/dp/084428470X/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2OEMI1HTGPD65&keywords=just+listen+and+learn+arabic&qid=1563991915&s=gateway&sprefix=just+listen+%26+learn+%2Caps%2C148&sr=8-2

Routledge Colloquial Arabic (Levantine)
Although the two Customer Reviews on Amazon are rather negative (2 stars) and actually quite to-the-point – that is, these introductory courses, which are frequently designed to meet only the short-term, transactional, CEFR A0 level, communication needs of a traveller to the region -- do indeed contain short, but useful dialogues. The audio recordings are freely-available via the publisher’s website.
https://www.amazon.com/Colloquial-Arabic-Levantine-Complete-Beginners/dp/0415726859/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=ROutledge+colloquial+arabic&qid=1563992533&s=gateway&sr=8-3
https://routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/colloquial/default.php#languages

A Course in Levantine Arabic by Ernest N. McCarus et al
According to the description, the course contains dialogues and exercises. In his post above, jeetchi221 appended a link to the audio recordings.
https://www.amazon.com/Course-Levantine-Arabic-Ernest-McCarus/dp/1607852233
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/j48vs07qatz30fe/AAB4bewBwIiAFuD58wJSEq6ma?dl=0

DLI GLOSS Arabic-Levantine
The DLI GLOSS files are fabulous for intermediate & above practice, and they’re free!
https://gloss.dliflc.edu/

NFLC Arabic (Levantine) files
The DLI GLOSS files are fabulous for intermediate & above practice. A subscription, in the amount of US$ 5.00 per month, but which can be cancelled at any time, is required to access these files.
http://portal.nflc.umd.edu/lessons/language/arabic-levantine?items_per_page=60&offset=0&=Apply

In addition, it seems to me that Amazon has a collection of materials which would be suitable for shadowing.
Levantine Arabic – Amazon.com
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Levantine+Arabic&i=stripbooks-intl-ship&ref=nb_sb_noss

Anything like Assimil-Linguaphone for Levantine Arabic - LLORG - July 2019
I notice that you have received some replies to your initial request.
https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=10764

EDITED:
Typos, tinkering.