Speak Arabic Campaign: Reflections for Non-native Learners

“Speak Arabic!

For the quickest path to raising the station of the language is not in praising it…

…but in its utilisation.”

Ziyad Ad-Darees

Founder of World Arabic Day

تحدّث العربية

فإنّ أقصرَ طريق لرفع مكانة اللغة العربية ليس في كثرة مديحها

بل في كثرة استخدامها

زياد الدريس

مؤسس إحتفالية اليوم العالمي اللغة العربية

The words above kept me awake for three hours last night.

Why?

Because my obsession is with learning to speak Arabic (and help others do the same!) and this phrase helped crystallise an idea that’s been swimming vaguely in my mind for a long time.

Those words form the conclusion of a video (right) aimed at native Arabic speakers, encouraging them them to use original Arabic words rather than imported English terms.

But they struck me because suddenly I appreciated the difference for a non-native learner between learning about Arabic, and actually learning to speak Arabic.

Many people know about Arabic, its beauty and unparalleled eloquence, and its special place with regards to the Quran. There are courses and books and poems that aim to convey the elegant grammar, the morphology of the ten measures, the subtleties of rhetoric…

But, in my opinion, this is not the same as learning to understand, to speak and to actually use the language.

My hope is that Arabic Workshop can help learners to engage with the language, setting them on a path to actually using it, for only with hearing and speaking the language do we truly bring it to life.

Find out more about the تحدّث العربيةَ (Speak Arabic) campaign at their twitter account- twitter.com/tahaddathar

Learn more about Arabic Workshop at arabicworkshop.com

…or try the app at app.arabicworkshop.com