Learning Arabic (and Other Languages) with YouTube

YouTube’s Trendspot­ting Tues­day focused this past week on the grow­ing num­ber of videos that can teach you a for­eign lan­guage (for free, of course). Among the 12 video col­lec­tions fea­tured here, you’ll find ones that offer lessons in French, Span­ish, Mod­ern Greek, Latin, Japan­ese and Swahili, among oth­ers. They also high­light clips that demon­strate how to write Ara­bic. (Find the first clip below.) Straight­away, you’ll notice that these videos have a home brewed feel to them, and they’re not nec­es­sar­i­ly as sub­stan­tive as what you can get for free via pod­cast. (See our large For­eign Lan­guage Les­son Pod­cast Col­lec­tion). But, at least when it comes to demon­strat­ing some­thing visu­al (such as how to write Ara­bic) they have their pur­pose.

(P.S. With the video below, I have no idea how much the “instruc­tor” actu­al­ly knows about Ara­bic. The point isn’t to pass this off as a defin­i­tive source of knowl­edge, but more to show how the video plat­form is being used.)

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