Sunday, September 11, 2005

Learn Arabic from the BBC

كلمات في الأخبار

You really have to get creative to learn Arabic well. Here is one of many ways to learn more vocabulary. The BBC regularly provides an English learning service for Arabic speakers at their online site. This service is called كلمات في الأخبار which means Words in the News. Clicking on this will take you to a page that contains a short description in Arabic of a current news article from the BBC. After this short description, there are selections of the original English text followed by a vocabulary list of Arabic that explains the meaning of certain selected words from the article.

For example, an article about forest fires contained the following English text followed by Arabic Vocabulary:

"Most of those who died are thought to have been incinerated in their cars as they tried to escape the flames. They've been fuelled by a cocktail of high summer temperatures, gusting winds and tinder dry conditions."

incinerated
احترق بالكامل

a cocktail
خليط

gusting winds
رياح عاتية

tinder dry conditions
جفاف شدي



Although this service is actually for Arabic speakers learning English, we can use it to our advantage and learn in the reverse. Below is the link to the كلمات في الأخبار online learning service. The title of the page is تعليم الإنجليزية. When this page comes up - choose an article and it will take you to the English and Arabic texts.

كلمات في الأخبار - Words in the News

Enjoy! Jeremy

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Article about Syrian Bloggers

Check it out:

Syria and Freedom of Speech Through the Internet from Reuters.

DAMASCUS, 4 September (IRIN) - Writing individual websites – or blogging as it is better known – is helping young Syrians re-engage with politics, users say, with dozens of web logs or "blogs" coming on line in the last year, promoting freedom of speech.

You can access the article at the link below

Article

Thursday, September 01, 2005

Iraqi version of American Idol!

Check this gem out from the LA Times about the Iraqi version of American Idol:

Link

Click on the option to watch the video clips and enjoy. It is somewhat sad, but worthy of attention.

Jeremy