How I am learning.

I wanted to write a lot about Egyptian Arabic, and Arabic in general today. But, I am back at home, not at university, so I will only do a short post outlining my method of learning.

I need a language schedule. Without it I would get nothing done. I used to put a lot of hours in every day, but now I have relaxed down to an 11-hour a week schedule.

I do an hour every weekday, and 3 hours every Saturday and Sunday.

I have the Colloquial Arabic of Egypt book and CDs, which are very good. I also have the Lonely Planet Egyptian Arabic phrasebook, which has more Arabic Script, more vocabulary and more topics. It is generally a lot more dense than the Colloquial book.

I also have several teachers who voluntarily help me with my Arabic. I have Skype sessions with them as often as I can, and also try to communicate with them in purely Arabic script on Facebook. It helped me get used to reading and recognising words quicker.

Another good resource is the Egyptian movies available on the internet. There are plenty of films in Egyptian Arabic here.

The main problem with learning a dialect of Arabic, as opposed to MSA (Modern Standard Arabic), is that there is remarkably little vocabulary available to memorise. Well, at least that's what I thought until I found this site. This website has vocab in both Egyptian Arabic and MSA, which is really useful. You can actually see the differences you will face when speaking and reading.

I will go into more detail about each resource and stuff like that next week. I will also start posting on both Saturdays and Sundays next week.