Resources

My Five Favorite Books for Learning Arabic

Cowell, Mark W. A Reference Grammar of Syrian Arabic. University of Michigan Press, 1964. GoogleBooks

Dickins, James and Janet Watson. Standard Arabic Student’s Book: An Advanced Course. Cambridge University Press, 1999. GoogleBooks

Elihai, Yohanan. The Olive Tree Dictionary: A Transliterated Dictionary of Conversational Eastern Arabic (Palestinian). Gefen Books, 2004. GoogleBooks

Ryding, Karin. A Reference Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic. Cambridge University Press, 2005. GoogleBooks

Zaki, Muna and Edmund Wyatt. Sudanese Proverbs: Translated, Transliterated, Explained. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015. GoogleBooks

Online Resources

Foreign Service Institute course
Text and audio; one of the best resources for improving your pronunciation. Hearing an American and a Syrian take turns just pronouncing /t/ and /d/ definitely helped me, at a time when I thought that I needed only to focus on letters like ح and ق and ع.

Team Nisreen
This blog is willing to consider the most informal, natural sources like memes and dirty/morbid jokes – which they then meticulously analyze.

صحتكم تهمنا
A bite-sized, down-to-earth, podcast that I’ve relied upon to improve my knowledge of medical terminology.

Other Resources

Brustad, Kristen. The Syntax of Spoken Arabic: A Comparative Study of Moroccan, Egyptian, Syrian, and Kuwaiti Dialects. Georgetown University Press, 2000. GoogleBooks
 As someone who’s not trying to learn six dialects simultaneously, I have found it to be a bit overkill. But I’m still glad I own it.

Huxley, Henry Minor. Syrian Songs, Proverbs, and Stories: Collected, Translated, and Annotated. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1902. Archive.org