Tag: Arabic

Learn Arabic through BBC Arabic

This is probably my top tip for learning Arabic. On the BBC app on iPhone and android you can press on any word to get translation offered – a feature annoyingly not available for Persian and a majority of other languages!

The translation option for me appears in a jumbled ت‌ر‌ج م ة （tarjima- translate) form; so you just select that and it gives you the translation without directing you to another page, which is more time consuming and whiplash-y for the eyes.

You can select more than one word to translate, as above. The weird tarjima option is far left. Note that in this update you can’t select the title, only the main body of text!

Anyway, in this way you can get through a news article pretty quickly and pick up relevant vocabulary as you go. I’m not sure why the same option isn’t available for other languages (BBC Farsi please…) since it seems so obviously useful.

At the base of the page will be links to more articles under the heading: مواضيع ذات صلة muwaadi3 dhaat Sila which of course means related topics, or literally, topics owning/that possess/having relation. You can go through these to read related articles, l which will probably have similar words and thus be good for consolidating vocabulary.

Of course the news can be a bit heavy in the Middle East at the moment, so maybe switch it up with some lighter stuff before you get pulled into a pit of despair!

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Learn Arabic through instagram

One tool you can use to learn Arabic – and in a more fun and engaging way than a textbook – is instagram. There are millions of public accounts posting about anything you can think of in the Arabic language and increasingly including longer text content. Many news groups and activist organisations (the line often blurs) use instagram to get their message out. There are also accounts dedicated to linguistic explorations, as below:

I love this account because it shows you how words spread across the region and even beyond – my favourite nugget of information was the link between the Arabic root رقص‌ raqs to dance and the Italian word for boy, ragazzo, as in the one who dances. In Farsi, the form is raqseedan.

In this account, queer graphic artist Saif Ali integrates queer graphic art with Arabic script. The above post depicts Sarah Hengazi, who was harassed by authorities after raising a pride flag at Mashrou Leila’s performance in Egypt and later committed suicide in exile. In each successive rendering the lines of one of her poems are written in a halo which appears saintlike over her head, and the poem in its Arabic form and English translation are presented in the caption. The line almajid lina المجد لینا ‘the glory to us’ has religious connotations and this is reflected in the artists portrayal of Sarah – martyred for the cause.

This account is Megaphone, a Lebanese independent media platform formed following the October 17 protests in 2019, referred to as the October revolution or thawrat 17 tishreen alawwal ثورة سبعة عشر تشرين الاول . It first began on Facebook before spreading to other social media platforms, and is one of many such accounts that have become popular as a result of changing media consumption habits amongst the youth and loss of faith in traditional and state affiliated media. In the above post, which is contextualised in both English and Arabic, Megaphone shows the Iranian reaction to their national anthem as the football team sang it before their second match in Qatar, having remained pointedly quiet before the first. I like the reported quote by former Iranian player Voria Ghafouri on Twitter –

من الافضل ان تموت واقفا على ان تحيا راكعا

– it is better (preferable) to die standing than to live on your knees

In Arabic it sounds better, since both standing waqifan and on your knees or kneeling raki’an are adverbs and so give a nice rhyming symmetry to the phrase.

Let me know if there are any accounts you like to follow in Arabic!