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.
Do you have any experience or opinions on the quality of programs like the Michel Thomas Method? I don’t really have the time or resources to spend on language learning at the moment, but if I could prepare for next year or the year after with an audio tape on a commute, it might help a bit if the learning device is suitable?
I think the Michel Thomas method is pretty good for getting a decent speaking/grammar base. There’s not a lot of vocabulary but you learn quite a lot of grammar and there’s a ton of repetition to really drill concepts into your brain. I’ve been doing the Mandarin lessons and having a good time. Thinking about starting Arabic, as well.
No I don’t have any experience with these methods, sorry.
This should give you some idea what the root system is like, and check my post history for lessons on the Arabic alphabet.
Impressive
Arabic Sarf (morphology) is such a beautiful and important part of the language. One big pillar of this system is verb forms, which should show you some of the logic underpinning all this. Ofc that is just a simple overview of verb forms.
Thanks for explaining
This is amazing. I don’t have the bandwith for this this year, but I hope you post again next year and then I can participate. This is something I’ve always wanted to learn.
Thanks comrade
I always feel a bit awkward doing this, but I don’t wanna go “market” myself on those language learning sites, it seems soul-sucking. And I absolutely enjoy teaching comrades, it’s enough that we get to talk culture from a materialist and anti-patriarchial lens. So I make this post once a year and cross my fingers that an interested comrade will see it, or maybe it’ll give someone the push to go learn a second language 
I actually do teach on those platforms you hinted towards. Let me tell you, if you get any students from here, I’ll be infinitely more pleasant than the bigoted, chauvinistic, asinine crap that I have to listen to on a daily basis.
So, good on you for trying!
And these platforms make the students feel so entitled, for example on some of these platforms the teachers gotta reply within minutes to maintain a high ranking vis-a-vis the algorithm.
I’ve taught about 8 comrades so far and it has definitely been a very rewarding experience. I love my comrades and I love teaching them as well as sharing with them some aspects of my culture. Incidentally, would anyone be interested in some recommendations of Arab films to watch?
Incidentally, would anyone be interested in some recommendations of Arab films to watch?
yes please!
I’ll make a post soon
I’m glad to hear you do this yearly! I just can’t right now due to life circumstances, but I’d so love to learn, especially from a fellow comrade. Thank you for such awesome work!
I guess I just love teaching Arabic, especially to comrades.
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
Found this old meme
Your flaws are like the merits of capitalism; non-existent.
You’re awesome for doing this :)
We have the best people, don’t we folks.
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
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.
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.
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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.
I am so down to learn Arabic but I’m worried that I won’t be able to give it the time or attention it deserves.
I get it, it’s not easy committing to something new. We could do a 2-week trial period and see how it goes. You are not gonna be making any major financial commitments, like buying textbooks. The important thing is to find the motivation to learn the language, the pace can be as slow as need be.
I’ll join you on Element if I don’t forget
I hope to see you soon
Are all the Arabic speaking countries mutually intelligible?
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
Nope. Just like Chinese, there are tons of dialects. The written language is the same but they are all pronounced differently.
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.
