I never touched a line of source code until after college. In college I studied history, focusing on the "Middle East" [1]. I took 3 years of Arabic in a (failed) attempt to use Arabic texts as primary sources in my thesis. Short story long, something about the highly structured and patterned nature of Arabic primed my mind for programming and made me more likely to enjoy programming. If you're looking for a pure intellectual pursuit, akin to how people recommend studying math just for the new ways of thinking that it provides, I heartily recommend studying Arabic

[1] Historians often call attention to that phrase because it has controversial history and connotations

Good work. I think you will need to add to the website that you mean Egyptian Arabic dialect. Also on safari mobile there is problem rendering the word character during writing.

I couldn't find stories other than omar's. Is there more or this just what is available now?

Also if you are using Franco in the sentence view, I would suggest defining the alphabetical definition of characters because they are not standard there. Specially outside Egyptian arabic.

I’m of Lebanese heritage and grew up speaking, reading and writing Arabic but then moved to Australia and never looked back for over 20 years. I’m slowly losing my ability to speak Arabic so I make a point of doing so when speaking to my parents nowadays. I also really love that tools like this exist so I can refresh myself. It’s a very sad thing to lose one’s mother tongue. I know it’s not the same dialect since it’s Egyptian but it’s easy enough to tell apart when I started reading. Still helpful!

I speak Arabic (Syrian) natively and I think this is great! Good work!

I agree with other comments that it might be helpful to mention somewhere that this is colloquial Egyptian Arabic. I can tell the difference easily but might be difficult for those who don't speak Arabic at all. But I like Egyption Arabic and I think it's weirdly more suitable for short stories like yours!

One more thing regarding the Arabic keyboard layout, I think it's a bit strange. I'm not sure if it's something specific to a locale or a layout I'm not familiar with, but I think most common layout is "Arabic 101", something like this[1][2]. You can find more details regarding the layout on Wikipedia[3].

Another small thing, on Firefox the "Listen" button doesn't seem to work. I see "Playing" in the tab name but I hear nothing.

1] https://imgur.com/a/Hmt8GZh

2] https://kbdlayout.info/KBDA1/

3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_keyboard

This seems to be the Egyptian dialect, not standard Arabic.

Wicked cool! I like this format of practice. Just found a small bug though. The click-to-translate for a given word seems to miss the target of click somewhere. It's translating عُمَر and سَارة as listen (and in the latter case the click gets `وسَارة` instead of just سَارة.)

For someone like myself, the biggest challenge will always be that the alphabet (abjad?) is unfamiliar. I am aware that it's rtl, and that letters are connected (and have different initial, medial, and terminal forms... as in Greek sigma, or some Hebrew letters). This would be accessible to more people if you included something to learn it first. I've discovered that once I do learn an alphabet, I can pick out cognates and other such words enough to make that worthwhile even if I go no further. I was planning on devanagari or hangul next though.

Source code is here for anyone curious: https://github.com/selmetwa/parallel-arabic

I was about to ask whether supporting Egyptian is in the roadmap, then read the comments and I'm happy to discover that's already Egyptian :-)

Im arab myself, hence the username :)

What I find fascinating myself is that no on actually speaks MSA, modern standard arabic. It is mostly used for written text that is meant to last? We dont text in standard arabic at all. Its used in government forms/legal documents etc..

This makes it such a challenge to teach ppl arabic since many books use MSA which can often sound alien to native speakers.

https://github.com/selmetwa/parallel-arabic/blob/e1b38771333...

Spelling mistake here - should be "sentences", not "Sentances".

One for bookmarking and following, thanks!

Tried learning Arabic from Duolingo for more than a year and loved learning my way around the script at least.

How about using Arabizi as an option for beginners? If oral fluency is sought, being able to read--while nice--isn't absolutely necessary. Arabizi is widely recognized-people who didn't already know the Roman alphabet learned it to text on their phones before smartphones became a thing.

I like the format but these seem grammatically incorrect written down in arabic, e.g. missing articles etc, I guess you're going for street Arabic but you should have it in fusha, it's easier to go other way around

This is great! As someone outgrowing Duolingo this is perfect. I do agree it would be nice to be able to switch between dialects.

This is great. I might finally be able to understand the Egyptian shows.

My Arabic is terrible. In the first lesson I learned a new word!

this is great - i would love to use this if it had MSA, levantine and egyptian dialects. It's a little annoying that a moving highlight is not present which is also tied to the audio playback. Would you consider implementing this?

Are the readings done via mic + real in the flesh speaker? Or are you using tts?

Both س and ص are transcribed as "s" — is this really a common convention?

Super great idea!!

This is Egyptian Arabic

Just note this is not arabic, it's a dialect unfortunately.