Learn Spoken Arabic

Everyday Shababeek’s staff works to serve you better by creating new resources and activities to enrich your time with us. You’ll receive access to hundreds of stories and recordings.  This online listening library contains a variety of voices and dialects for use in your sessions. This saves you precious session prep time and allows you to focus purely on your growth in understanding. Included in your session costs are monthly workshops on intercultural development and adaptation.  As an added service, you’ll have access to quarterly sessions with a transition and adaptation coach as well as regular program consultations with the Program Director. We believe in upgrading the skills of our staff through weekly training workshops in order to maintain a high level of professionalism in our service to you.  Your sessions will never be cancelled so you are guaranteed the hours you have scheduled.

As many as you can. It takes around 1600 hours of sessions to build a vocab of 10,000 recognizable words. This is when we start to understand most of what we hear around us.

Ask yourself the question: “How long do I want to wait to know people and be known by locals?” The more hours you are participating daily, the faster the “wall of noise” around you will become familiar sounds and the more you’ll feel a sense of belonging.

We recommend taking 20 hours weekly for your first year of sessions to fast-track your learning.

 

In his book, Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell highlights a study originally published in the “Harvard Business Review.” The general premise has become known as the “10,000 hours to become an expert rule.” In the book Gladwell explains the research behind the notion that true expertise is achieved after an individual has invested 10,000 hours in learning or practicing a skill. This may be a sport, a musical instrument or the study of something.

There are many ways to define “fluency.” If, for the sake of argument, we consider fluency to be the same as being an “expert” in speaking a language, then a learner may well invest 10,000 hours in their language studies to attain fluency.

An easier question to answer is, “How long until I understand most of what is happening around me?”  In this case, it’s necessary to become familiar with at least 10,000 vocabulary words in any given language.  We find this takes most people around 1600 hours of sessions in Arabic.  Depending on how many hours you are committing, this can be obtained in as few as 16 months to as long as three years time.

For more information on this topic, check out this article.

At Shababeek our efforts are focused on helping you quickly understand the world around you and develop relationships. We focus on practical skills you need rather quickly, like reading sight words on signs and text messaging your friends.

We follow the same natural progress you took in your native tongue. In first grade you began learning to read and write the words that were already familiar. In the same way we want to build a first grade vocabulary before learning to text message our friends.

At Shababeek we have many written resources to help you progress beginning in Phase 2 according to your personal abilities.

All you need is a recording device and both ears. You can purchase one (Sony digital flash recorder or Olympus recorders are both good) or use your phone or tablet/ipad.

Our participants enjoy the following apps:

Voice Record Pro

Hi-Q MP3 recorder for Android

Voice recorder and audio editor for iPhone