Egyptian Arabic: Easy Stories With English Translations | Now Available!
- Written byDonovan NagelDonovan NagelTeacher, translator, polyglot🎓 B.A., Theology, Australian College of Theology, NSW🎓 M.A., Applied Linguistics, University of New England, NSW
Applied Linguistics graduate, teacher and translator. Founder of The Mezzofanti Guild and Talk In Arabic. - Read time3 mins
- Comments10
- Incremental difficulty at an appropriate level for high beginners
- Easy-to-read, large Arabic font with moderate tashkeel
- Vocab lists and English translations
- Accompanying audio for each chapter
- Not appropriate for brand new beginners of Arabic
Egyptian Arabic: Easy Stories With English Translations consists of 12 mini stories written in colloquial Egyptian Arabic that incrementally rise in length and difficulty. Arabic font is super easy to read, tashkeel is used where necessary to assist reading, and the audio is available on [TalkInArabic.com](https://talkinarabic.com).
If you’ve been following me on social media (or TalkInArabic.com) then you might have heard the news already.
No? Here it is:
We just made our first foray into publishing!
That’s book publishing.
Actual paper and ink. 🙂
The first paperback edition of our new series is titled Egyptian Arabic: Easy Stories With English Translations and it consists of 12 mini stories written in colloquial Egyptian that incrementally rise in length and difficulty.
You know, the problem with Arabic reading material is much the same as the general problem with all learning resources – nearly all of it is in Modern Standard Arabic.
And even the reading material that is localized in spoken dialects tends to be too advanced for lower-level learners.
Since it’s a first edition and a totally new venture for us, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
You can pre-order it here from Amazon.
Here’s the gist of what you’ll find in the book:
- 12 mini stories on various focus topics, full of high-frequency vocabulary and expressions pertaining to those topics.
- Stories that incrementally rise in length and difficulty.
- Each story has a comprehension exercise section at the end of the chapter.
- Key vocabulary lists for each story (most of the main vocab used throughout the story).
- Full English translations in the back of the book (away from the Arabic so you’re not tempted by it).
- Large, clear font and moderate use of tashkeel (vowel markings) to improve readability for lower-level learners.
- All dialogues are bolded so they’re easy to distinguish.
- Lined, note-taking sections.
I really need to emphasize that this book is NOT for absolute beginners. If you’ve never studied Arabic before then I’d advise coming back to this later on.
Likewise, if you’re an Advanced, fluent speaker of Egyptian or a native speaker, then it may be too easy for you.
We’ve carefully designed this for a high-beginner -> low-intermediate learner.
It can be difficult to gauge exactly where you’re at but as a general rule, if you:
- Can read Arabic letters/script
- Have a solid grounding in core, fundamental vocabulary (the typical words you cover in a beginner course) that are the highest frequency in the language
Then the book is for you.
Focus topics of the stories and vocabulary generally cover: family, work, clothing, relationships, shopping, travel/tourism, schooling/education, food/eating out, emigrating, language learning and more.
Rather than have a whole book on one specific topic or one long story, we decided to cover a lot of relevant topics and aim for variety.
Here’s the pre-order page again.
If you have any specific questions about it, I’m happy to answer them.
Thanks a lot! 🙂
Oh, and if you do decide to go ahead and order the book, I’d love to hear your honest feedback (either drop a comment here, on Amazon or shoot me an email).
Note: We’ve had issues getting our ‘Look Inside’ images up on Amazon (restrictions on our publisher) so we’ve added a few photo samples to the TalkInArabic.com page here.
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10 COMMENTS
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Filip Konopka
Hi there, today I’ve bought your book Egyptian Arabic easy stories with English translations (Donovan Nagel). I was promised that I can download MP3 audio records for this book. But how can I find it? Where can I download it? Thank you for your answer!
Glenn Kelly
Do you plan on putting out an audio reading to accompany the book. I’m a big fan of the Dino Lernt Deutsche books in no small part due to them having audio files of the chapters read in a pleasing manner and at a pace suitable for the beginner.
Donovan Nagel
Hi Glenn.
Yes, the audio is now available. Did you purchase the book already?
David
No, I only just heard about it recently; it’s not for me - Arabic is not currently on my wish list (or at least, it ranks behind Hindi, Breton, Klingon and others - yeah, I have idiosyncratic interests), but I have a friend who wants to learn Egyptian Arabic, so I ordered the book as a present for her, and wanted to check that she could do the LingQ-style simultaneous reading and listening thing if she wanted. Thanks for letting me know.
Donovan Nagel
Hey David,
That’s great. I hope she enjoys it!
The audio is up and available but we haven’t publicly displayed it yet. Will probably do that some time today or tomorrow.
I’ll email you with info on how to access it shortly.
David
Though actually, I’m not seeing a link to the audio either on the TalkInArabic webpage or on Amazon yet.
David
Is there any way of being notified of when the audiobook version will be available?
Donovan Nagel
Hi David,
It is available as of today actually. Did you previously email us about it?
Owain
Any plans to sell it other than Amazon?
Donovan Nagel
Yep.
It’s available through our publisher