Welcome to the first post of the How To Say series where we’ll explore all the little words in Levantine Arabic that are often overlooked yet make all the difference.
And the first word is…”still”!
Tag: spoken arabic
Fakr bel Arabi is a series of posts aimed at helping Levantine Arabic learners to speak and sound like natives, by highlighting the little quirks of the spoken language, through the close analysis of sentences structures of everyday speech.
Say whaaaat?! (I promise it’s nothing complicated)
**Note: This is for Levantine Arabic learners who have no prior or little knowledge in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA).
So welcome to the first post of Fakr bel Arabi (think in Arabic).
In this post, you will learn how to say the Levantine Arabic equivalent of
“when I was young/little”
You probably have heard of Amr Maskoun, a hilarious Syrian YouTuber/Comedian.
Now, while he’s no doubt really funny, his videos are not the easiest to comprehend for non-natives.
So in this post, I will share four of my favourite clips. They are all around a minute long.
And there are tons of Syrian slang phrases that you can learn from them.
Some of the phrases are quite unkind and harsh…but if you’re learning a spoken language, you got to learn all of them, eh? Both the good and the bad.
Ready? Let’s go!
In this post, I will talk about two numbers that you can use in Spoken Arabic to place emphasis on a subject matter.
The two numbers are نص (half) and ستين (sixty).
In addition, you can also hear how these numbers are used in contexts via an audio track available online.
So let’s find out how to use these numbers, shall we? Yalla, here we go…
Hey guys!
So I came across a Youtube channel called “The Adventures of Sitt Najeh” which acts as another resource for me to practice listening to Lebanese Arabic and to pick up new words.
The series is about a Lebanese middle age woman who moved to Canada from Lebanon, and each video pokes fun at the differences in the living conditions and culture between both countries. I like the channel as each video is short (most are under 5 minutes) and some of them have English subtitles.
In this post, I will introduce you to one of the videos titled “كلها منافع ” which means “Everything about it has benefits”. And, the “it” refers to a traffic jam.
So without further ado, let’s dive in to see how do traffic jams contain any benefits – from the perspective of Sitt Najeh, of course!
كلها منافع !!
Watch this video on YouTube.
A few months ago, the Human Rights Watch released short snippets featuring video potraits of people from the LQBT community in the Middle East on their FaceBook page. I have specifically chosen those from the Levant (Jordan and Lebanon) and I will be providing the transcriptions in this post.
The topic may be controversial for some but my intention is to learn spoken Arabic. So reserve your judgements and let’s learn Levantine Arabic!
Ready? Yalla!
Yippee, another song post!
Mike Massy is one of my favourite Lebanese artists – so presenting to you a catchy and upbeat song of his for this post!
Mike Massy - Khalasna Ba'a - English Subtitles
Watch this video on YouTube.
The title says it all!
Read on to find out the 6 phrases to tell someone to get lost!
I’ve personally never said any of them although I’m probably guilty of muttering some under my breath 😉
Do you have years of MSA classes under your belt but felt discouraged and frustrated when you arrived in a Middle Eastern country and realised that you cannot understand most of the conversations?
Or are you already aware that practically nobody speaks MSA in their daily lives and desperately hope to avoid being caught in the above-mentioned situation?
Ever wish for a book that you can invest in and refer to it constantly as a guide?
But have yet to find a suitable book?
Luckily for all of us Levantine Arabic learners, that book does exist!
And that book is…..