Welcome to "belmaṣri", a podcast introduction to Egyptian Arabic. My name is Karim, and I want to help you get acquainted with one of the most beautiful languages in the world, and one that is spoken by between 300 and 420 Million people worldwide...according to Wikipedia anyway :-) I decided to start this podcast because I love languages, and over the course of my journey learning them, I have met several people learning Arabic, my mother tongue. Speaking with those people opened my eyes to the fact that Arabic is not an easy language to learn...and moreover, that there are not so many resources available to learn it as a foreign language. As native speakers, as with all languages, we somehow absorb our mother tongue as children...we get it without really having to "learn" it...this is why quite often you will find that native speakers cannot explain a grammar rule to you. They just know the right way to say what they want to say, because it "sounds right" to them. This is probably why I never realised how difficult Arabic is until I met people who were trying to learn it as adults...they come to me with complaints about things that don't make sense to them...well also sometimes things that don't make sense at all :-) or rules that have too many exceptions, or (as is famous with Arabic) difficulties in pronunciation. I love Arabic, and I would like to see other people learn it and enjoy its richness. That's what this podcast is for. I've never done a podcast before, and so I can't really promise you too much. I guess we will start together and learn and improve together.

So...before starting to learn Arabic, some decisions need to be made.

The first question is simply "which Arabic?" Arabic is a very old language, and over the centuries, it has evolved differently in different parts of the Arab world. There are, therefore, many "Arabics" around. The "classical" version of Arabic that is currently used is often referred to as "Modern Standard Arabic" or MSA. This language is generally used in official communications, newspapers, the news bulletin on TV, most literature, and often on the radio when it comes to "serious" programming, like news or documentaries. This version is understood in all the Arab world...but it has one drawback. If you speak to someone in MSA, they are most likely to have a hard time keeping a straight face...it's generally not a spoken language, so if somebody would speak to me in the street in this Arabic, I would find it quite funny. Although I've sometimes gotten stuck having to fall back on this version of Arabic speaking to someone from Morocco or Algeria (where the native accent is very difficult, sometimes incomprehensible to me), but in general it is not very useful as a spoken language I would say. Aside from MSA, there are almost as many dialects of Arabic as there are Arabic-speaking countries. Saudi, Lebanese, Palestinian, Egyptian, Algerian, Moroccan, Jordanian...with varying degrees of similarity. For this podcast, I have decided to focus on Egyptian Arabic. Why? For several reasons. First of all, I'm Egyptian :-) So for me there are not so many options. But secondly, and more importantly, Egyptian Arabic is understood everywhere in the Arab world. I have not been in an Arab country where I've had trouble communicating in Egyptian. People might look at you in a kind of funny way a bit. They might mention to you a line from a famous Egyptian play, or answer you with a joke that they know from an Egyptian movie, but generally people react in a very positive way to Egyptian Arabic, and it's very well understood. Egypt has historically been the centre of culture in the Arab world...producing most films, music, literature...etc. I think it's for this reason that people all over can understand Egyptian. Moreover, I think learning to speak with people and understand them is more important than reading and writing, at least to start with, and so that automatically excludes MSA as a possibility...so we're left with a dialect, and as dialects go I believe Egyptian is the most reasonable choice.

The second question is how to learn it. Since the focus is going to be on speaking and listening, I think it makes sense to postpone the Arabic alphabet. It can come later...so for this podcast series we will focus on the interactive side of the language, and when writing we will use Latin characters rather than Arabic ones. It's really not necessary to start with the characters. It only makes things much more difficult, and it doesn't add a lot of value at this stage. Of course, later on, when you reach a point where you want to read a book in Arabic, or to read the street signs, or to read the newspaper, you will need to understand the written script, but to start with, we will not use Arabic characters. I will be following a book, but you don't need to buy it I think. I will try to get everything from the book into the podcast episodes. This book was created by the Dutch in order to teach Arabic in Amsterdam University. I think it has quite a solid structure to it, and uses an internally consistent system. In general I think it provides a good balance, and a good place to start. It's called "kullu tamam!" Which means, loosely translated, "everything is fine!"

I've put a link to the book at the bottom of the transcript.

I hope everything will be fine with this podcast, and you will soon start to speak Arabic.

Just to give you a quick flavour, "belmaṣri" means "in Egyptian". The initial "b" is a prefix that is added to a word and means "with" or, as in this case, "in". The next two letters "el" is another prefix, and it means "the". "maṣri" means, well, "Egyptian" :-) For example, if I wanted to say that I'm Egyptian, being a man, I would say "ana maṣri"..."ana" means "I", and in this case no verb is necessary. The verb "to be" is often implicit in Arabic this way. You will notice that we tend to put a lot of prefixes and suffixes to words, so in one words you can really say a lot about the person performing the action, and the person affected by it (the object)...etc. For example, a girl would say "ana maṣriyya". The suffix changes according to the gender. You will also notice that the "s" sound in "maṣri" is not like an English "s". It's quite a "heavy" s, which is referred to in the book as an "emphatic" s. Don't worry about the term "emphatic", if it sounds too serious or theoretical. It's just the way the book refers to it, so I thought it would be good to introduce it. The shape of the mouth is different with these two sounds. With the regular English "s", the mouth is kind of wide and flat, but with the heavy, or emphatic "s", it's more closed. You can try to replicate it by making the regular "s" sound, and while you're still exhaling, move your mouth as if you are about to kiss somebody :-) The heavy/emphatic "s" will be written as an s with a dot beneath it, so ṣ.

Another example. If I would introduce myself to someone, I could just say "ana Karīm", which would mean "I am Karim". Note that here the i has a dash above it to indicate that it's a long/extended vowel sound, so "Karīm", not "Karim".

Anyway...I wasn't planning to start teaching Arabic today :-) In the next episode we will start learning Arabic, so get ready! And, till then, ma𝜀‿essalama.

Oh, and one final thing. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for improvement, just e-mail me at belmasri@posteo.org.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1111085.Kullu_Tamam_