Arabic

Arabic-Speaking World

Arabic (الْعَرَبيّة al-ʿarabiyyah or just عَرَبيْ ʿarabī) is the largest living member of the Semitic language family in terms of speakers. It is closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic. Modern Standard Arabic, widely studied and known throughout the Islamic world, derives from Classical Arabic, the only surviving member of the Old North Arabian dialect group.

Arabic has lent many words to other languages of the Islamic world, as Latin has contributed to most European languages. And in turn, it has also borrowed from those languages, as well as Persian and Sanskrit from early contacts with their affiliated regions.

During the Middle Ages, Arabic was a major vehicle of culture, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy, with the result that many European languages have also borrowed numerous words from it, especially Spanish and Portuguese due to both the proximity of European and Arab civilization and 700 years of Arab governance of the Iberian peninsula.

Arabic Learning Resources

Arabic Podcasts

News in Arabic

News feeds from around the Arabic-speaking world provide language exposure and practice joined with current events, culture, politics, science, sports and more. At Free Language, you can view summaries of these feeds and jump to view full articles when your interest is piqued.

Arabic Internet TV

Watching people speak Arabic is a good way to gain exposure to the language in a non-study environment. This is great for folks who aren't living where the language is spoken and especially those already proficient in listening comprehension. If you don't understand anything, it's cool to "vegg out" for a while, but it's not the most productive thing you can do to learn. Try to find something with subtitles, and you're on the way. ;)

If you do get into Internet TV, I highly recommend Miro, a free and open source media player with multimedia RSS capability that supports Linux, Mac and Windows. Hey, "because open media matters."

At any rate, below you'll find resources with literally thousands of Internet TV stations in a wide variety of languages. Amongst them you'll find plenty in Standard Arabic. Enjoy!

Helpful Resources and Tools for Arabic

FoxLingo Free Firefox Browser Extension Software for Translating Web Pages
Online Flashcard Exchange Community
Foreign Language Translation Extensions/Tools/Plugins/Add-Ons for the Firefox Web Browser
PhraseBase.com Multi-Lingual Conversational Phrase Database Resource
Word2Word.com Website

Make Friends Learning Arabic

Social language learning has become incredibly popular on the web as it has transcended language barriers in previously impossible ways. Right now someone in an Arabic-speaking country could be interested in teaching you Arabic in exchange for your English skills. If you speak other languages, the odds are even better that you'll find someone interested in a language exchange.

Note that not all networks below support Arabic. Collectively, though, they support pretty much every language.

Subscribe to Arabic Updates

Get all the latest Arabic language resources from Free Language delivered to your RSS reader or inbox. Click here to subscribe.

Don't know what RSS is? Click here and it could save you plenty of time. And perhaps revolutionize your web experience.

Arabic Language Aggregator

Free Language aggregates (brings together) web feeds in about about the Arabic language for the purpose of exposing users to content in this language. Not only that, users interested in getting this dynamic combo of Arabic feeds in on single RSS feed can click here and sit back. :)

Best of Luck!

Best of luck in your language-learning endeavors! Please send suggestions about resources and improving this website.