It’s that time of the year again 
This is probably my fifth year doing this, I guess I just love teaching Arabic, especially to comrades.
I enjoy making things make sense, and Arabic is absolutely perfect for this! It’s its own language, one that is based on its own (magical, as comrade mathemachristian called it) root system, and not just a mishmash of different languages. You’ll love learning about patterns, verb forms, and how to derive words from the magical root system, you’ll see how powerful and expressive Arabic really is.
I have my own course material that I constantly improve upon, and it helps me adapt the lessons and study plan to my students’ interests as well as their pace. I truly believe that language learning has to be fun and engaging, and things need to make sense, starting from the dots on the letters.
Let me know if you have any questions about Arabic or how I conduct my classes. As for the money, it’s pay what you can since this is something I do on the side and enjoy immensely.
I have been teaching @mathemachristian@hexbear.net once a week for more than a year now and I asked him if he’d like to talk about his experience learning Arabic so far, I think what he wrote deserves its own post:
Learning arabic is great fun. Deciphering the meaning of sentences, deconstructing them and reconstructing them in a new language is a very fun and rewarding puzzle in its own right. And arabic makes the reconstruction very easy because it is very regular. Once you start to really delve into it, it also becomes easier and easier to vibe meaning of arabic words you don’t know, not just from context, but because arabic constructs them in a way that makes them deliberately similar to words of similar meaning. You just find the magic 3 letters and the word is (likely to be) revealed! What most people probably are intimidated by is the script, but it actually is very easy, and the standard font doesn’t do it’s beauty justice. It’s just a cursive script. If you know a latin cursive you already mastered a worse cursive.
I’m also very much enjoying that the lessons don’t follow the standard A1 then A2 then B1 and so on format that involves memorizing a lot of sentences and stilted dialogues. The absence of a verb for “to be” makes it very easy to start constructing your own sentences, bypassing tenses, conjugation &c. and leave them for later.
Plus it opens dialogues that are great fun. Arab people are overjoyed at someone being able to say some basic sentences, or read/write arabic it opens a lot of doors and is just awesome fun. Surprise your friends by casually having a notebook full of arabic writing lying around!
If you want, you can dm me from a throwaway account, or contact me on Element.
And like I said last year, if there is interest for group lessons I’d be more than happy to do that.
this sounds amazing and I think I would like to try but I don’t understand quite how it works. you are giving 1on1 personal lessons for each person who wants it?? is it more like an online classroom setting like those ‘zoom’ meetings but on a different platform? is it all written learning or do your students speak with you audibly, or with each other? I would love to learn Arabic but I can’t understand how it would be possible to do that not in a class setting or surrounded by people to speak it with you. sorry for a barrage of questions
you are giving 1on1 personal lessons for each person who wants it??
Yes, unfortunately there aren’t that many comrades who wanna learn Arabic
We use a Zoom alternative and an online whiteboard, as well as a pdf lesson for each class. Also we use Element for instant messaging, so we can schedule the classes, share files/homework and so on. Let me know if you have any other questions!
More than ever, I have a desire to get to the point where I can look at a sentence and be able to interpret it, and also make sentences beyond just “men el-mayeh lel-mayeh”. The stage of “being able to sound it out and maybe pick out a word here and there” is feeling really awkward.
Time is a little bit more limited now but resources are less limited. Also I have a coworker who speaks Arabic, and no shortage of other Arabic speakers in the area.
I can see that you have a certain goal in mind and so I think a class per week might be perfectly adequate for what you are aiming for. But if you don’t have time for that, I can send you the pdf lessons over on Element.
I took a few lessons a couple years back from this comrade. Life got in the way In a big way for me, but I can certainly say Prof knows whatsup. Very good teacher, and had no issues starting from absolute scratch. If you are interested, go for it, you wont regret it.
I started teaching myself a couple weeks ago, but then the cops took my van and everything I owned and that kinda fuckered that plan, but since I’ve got nothing to do now except do drugs and play Songs of Syx, I’m down.
I feel like I mostly figured out how to pronounce the ayn sound, and I’m kinda proud of myself for that lol.
Sold. I need to learn so i can speak with wifu. Mashallah
I wish I could learn Arabic but for now I need to focus on improving my Chinese and German language skills from basic to fluent, before I can start in on a brand new language. Its very cool that you are doing the good work of teaching Arabic to comrades!
I guess I just love teaching Arabic, especially to comrades.
I tried to learn Arabic when I had a Muslim phase around 13-ish. I got started on the writing system and even tried to recite prayers in Arabic but never mastered it. To this day I don’t know the Arabic writing system and it angers me. With that being said, I would be interested in learning it, at least in the near-future.
You can hmu whenever, and check my post history for lessons on the Arabic script.
That sounds sick, thanks for offering. Maybe I’ll take you up on it eventually. For now, I’m about a year deep into mandarin, and I barely have it in me to study for that haha
do you mind if I ask how you are going about learning mandarin? how much would you say you know it after a year of working on it?
I’m paying for 1 on 1 teaching 3x per week, we go through her textbooks page by page. Then I supplement with whatever solo reading, listening, and other studying I can manage to get myself to do throughout the week, which is admittedly little.
Going by the CEFR system I’d call myself firmly A2. I can understand even reasonably complex sentences as long as they’re spoken slowly, I can form sentences for all the general basic stuff. I often struggle with the finer points of forming complicated sentences myself though, stuff that has multiple clauses and such. And I definitely struggle with following conversations spoken at a normal speed, even if they’re clearly spoken and use only words I know well. There’s definitely still a firm “translation layer” going on, where I have to think about what any given sentence means in English rather than just understanding it directly in Chinese.
I’m getting close to the point that I could pass the HSK2 exam if I wanted to, HSK1 would be easy ofc.
Good luck with your Mandarin journey.
Thanks! I’m enjoying it, even if it’s tricky!
Everything they say about it being difficult is true. In fact, you can’t even understand just how difficult it really is until about after 6-12 months of study. Then you can finally see just. how. high. that mountain really is. Everest is nothing, you know that mountain on Mars? Like that but more difficult.
Yeesh. Second most difficult language for native English speakers to learn as adults. Plus there are tons of dialects that can’t understand each other. Egyptian is “standard” but try that in Saudi.
I’ll join you on Element if I don’t forget
I hope to see you soon
I really cannot recommend it enough. It’s such great fun if you have an inkling of an interest reach out and see if you can’t make it work somehow. They really went beyond what I would have expected to make it accessible for me for instance.
And I really am glad we made it work because it has been a pleasure teaching you, comrade 
I would love to learn Arabic someday, but Chinese is already hard enough for now haha. Regardless, keep up the good work comrade!
We internationalists should at least try to learn a second language. Remember not to use Duolingo though, it’s “AI-first”.
The world is not a global village, and not everyone speaks American.
Remember not to use Duolingo
Many people are saying it, folks
@SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net Doing that Trump bit reminded me of you, comrade
hope you’re having a good day.
Are all the Arabic speaking countries mutually intelligible?
Nope. Just like Chinese, there are tons of dialects. The written language is the same but they are all pronounced differently.
That is an important question. What I teach is Modern Standard Arabic which is intelligible throughout the Arab world, and when the student gets to a solid place in MSA then we can learn a dialect as well. Arabic is diglossic, which I believe makes it even more interesting. First you’ll learn the basics of standard/formal Arabic and then you’ll see where the dialect has diverted and why, dialects are characterized by their very simplified grammar compared to MSA, and so I believe it makes the most sense to learn MSA and then see what simplifications occurred in colloquial, and learn about the foreign loanwords that entered it through conquest and whatnot. Sorry about the long reply
