My name is Marie-Aude and in Arabic I’m often called مريم , for convenience. I live in Morocco (I married a Moroccan).
Like many people, learning Arabic is difficult for me
I tried to learn Arabic for a long time, without any success. It has to be said that I had quite a few obstacles to overcome:
- at first, I was living in Germany and didn’t speak German very well, so I started learning Arabic in a language I didn’t know very well – guaranteed failure!
- my husband is Berber, so in the family we speak more Berber than Arabic, and I wasn’t able to tell the difference, so I happily mixed them up
- in Morocco, we speak darija, which is rather different from standard Arabic, so practising with people on a daily basis led me to develop bad habits
- I’m someone who has more of a visual memory than an auditory one, and I couldn’t learn Arabic writing
- finally, when I learn a language, I need to understand the grammar very quickly. The methods where you’re told “you say this” and “you say that”, that just doesn’t work.
I wanted to share my learning of Arabic
A few weeks ago, everything just clicked: I found a channel with an amazing teacher on Youtube in English, and by following her method, in six days I was finally able to decipher Arabic. Progress was super fast after that!
So I decided to create this website to share my learning with you. I’m not a teacher! I’m a student!
I’m very careful about what I write, I try to have it systematically proofread, and I also give you lots of links to help you learn on your own. Doing this motivates me and pushes me to improve my Arabic.
- as I’m a bit ahead of my posts, it’s good revision
- explaining to others forces you to prove that you’ve understood correctly
- I’ve already got three people I know who’ve decided to learn at the same time as me
And Arabic is a beautiful language, but there are very few good, educational resources for learning it on the web in French and most of them are ‘religious’ (made by/for people who want to read the Quran and/or do their ‘hijra’). This is less of a problem in English (obviously, as Maha, “my teacher” makes her videos in English)
How do I use this section of the site?
Quite simply, by doing the lessons in the order in which they are presented.
The lessons are deliberately simple, so that they can be assimilated in a short space of time. In fact, it’s better to devote a short amount of time each day to learning a language than two hours once a week.
.The pronunciation of many Arabic words can be heard by clicking on the little blue arrow. The recordings come from the Forvo site, a community site where people can pronounce words in their own language and ask for words in other languages. Except to highlight dialectal differences, the pronunciations chosen correspond to the standard Arabic spoken in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Emirates).
So are you ready to start the adventure with me? Don’t hesitate to ask me any questions!
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