Have you been binging on YouTube lately? Hopefully not in English!
To supplement your normal Arabic lessons, YouTube videos in your target language can be of immense help. YouTube is a fantastic tool for language learning, more so than most people give it credit for.
And when you’re studying a world language like Arabic, you’ll practically be spoiled for choice when it comes to deciding what to watch. There’s seriously something out there for everybody!
Interested in gaming? Arabic gamers. Food? You betcha. Documentaries? Right there with you.
And even if you’re just beginning to get comfortable with Arabic, there are still fantastic free resources on Arabic YouTube channels to guide you along the way—including one that you’ll find very familiar, indeed.
Category: Educational
Level: Intermediate
Dialect: Various
The Arabic language doesn’t have a ton of cultural capital in the Western world, and that’s a crying shame. When you learn Arabic, you open your ears and eyes to some amazing film and edge-of-your-seat television—as well as a truly magnificent collection of soap operas.
This channel has not only pronunciation videos to help you understand the subtleties of Arabic words, but also a short series where the creator explains certain lines from real TV dramas. He breaks them apart and helps you understand real Arabic as used in media, giving you a huge boost in your listening comprehension.
Category: Kids’ TV
Level: Beginner-Intermediate
Dialect: MSA, Gulf Arabic
Ahlan Simsim was one of the first regional varieties of the world-famous American show Sesame Street, originally broadcast in the 1970s. It got canceled after a while, but in the 2010s it was brought back with a wonderful variety of clips on YouTube.
The first time you watch an episode, you might think that it’s too advanced for you – after all, they speak only in Arabic the whole time, and there are no subtitles.
But the repetitive nature of kids’ programming, some excellently catchy songs, and a production style built on decades of educational TV say otherwise.
After just a couple of episodes, you’ll be picking up new words and phrases—plus, if you’re familiar with the original Sesame Street, you’ll get to see the way things are localized into other cultures.
Watch your favorite games being played with commentary and reactions in Gulf Arabic! Sadly, this video series was discontinued about a year ago, but Saudi Gamer was one of the most popular Arabic-speaking YouTubers in his day, and he
rel="noref"> uploaded videos from every kind of genre—particularly action and VR.
One considerate thing he does is translate English text when necessary for his audience to understand. Obviously, not every game has an Arabic translation, so you can use these translated words as anchors when he loses you with his rapid-fire speaking style. This is definitely for advanced learners!
From the title, you might think that this is a combination fitness and food channel. Nope—these days at least, it’s all about the food.
From street food tours in Europe to the most expensive steak in the country, these two hosts have wonderful energy between them and clearly have a great time eating lots and lots of excellent food.
They speak Gulf Arabic in their videos, but they subtitle all the popular ones in English so that you can follow along even as you get used to the Gulf Arabic dialect.
The craft and passion on display in this Arabic food YouTube channel truly sets these apart from the rest, and you may want to start learning Gulf Arabic after watching it!
If there’s one type of video you can find in any language on the planet, it’s a makeup tutorial. Arabic is no exception. Out of hundreds of candidates, we’ve chosen Marwa Yehia for a couple of reasons.
First, she speaks Egyptian Arabic relatively slowly and clearly without the crazy editing that some people prefer.
Finally, most of her videos have professionally done English subtitles so you can check your comprehension. ouTubers focused on just one subject like this tend to be a little easier to understand because their content all stays within one area of vocabulary. Once you get used to the nuances of one person’s accent, you can more easily transfer that knowledge to other people’s voices.
Since Arabic sentence structure is so different from that of English, it’s a wonder more people don’t teach like Safaa does.
In her YouTube Arabic language lessons, Arabic sentences are color-coded so that you can see exactly how the words line up with the English translations. She’s also included all the vowel marks in the Arabic so you can learn to recognize those too, as they appear in your textbooks.
Her videos move at a very gentle pace, but this is valuable with a language like Arabic with such different pronunciation compared to European languages. It’s good to balance some super-slow and super-clear pronunciation videos with more natural speech.
Category: Educational
Level: Beginner-Intermediate
Dialect: MSA and Egyptian
It’s like he says on his cover photo: Arabic is not hard anymore! Michael George has recorded several dozen individual phrases and sentences, but that’s not what his channel is best known for.
This is an extremely valuable resource for people just getting their heads around Arabic syntax, as seeing the function of every word will make you fully understand how the sentence and the story flow.
By the way, if you’re interested in Egyptian Arabic, he’s also got a number of videos explaining particulars of that language.
Deutsche Welle is a public German television station that does excellent reporting on European and international news and history. They have a number of multilingual channels, including this one with broadcasters speaking beautiful MSA. They also upload very frequently!
When interviewees speak English, German, or another language other than Arabic, it’s dubbed over in MSA.
This has its pros and cons compared to having subtitles. On the one hand, it can be a little jarring to hear the original language in the background, but on the other, you can stay immersed in an MSA world more consistently.
One theme we’ve come back to again and again so far is the importance of subtitles in your learning. This is particularly important when you have to get used to an entirely new alphabet, because you’ll have to train your brain to associate a new set of symbols with a new set of sounds and meanings.
Fortunately, Ananas is here to help, as they’ve got a great set of songs and news broadcasts in Arabic with Arabic subtitles, including some with the vowels marked! Quite considerately, they’ve included news broadcasts about things happening all over the globe, not just in Arabic-speaking countries. After all, there are Arabic learners in every country!
Yes, that’s right, ArabicPod101 is on here too, and for good reason! On YouTube, ArabicPod101 publishes loads of excellent material breaking down grammar and helping you correctly pronounce Arabic words.
Perhaps even more exciting, though, are the listening comprehension videos. These are super-helpful for slowly developing your comprehension and your vocabulary, since each conversation is repeated twice, again with the benefit of subtitles in English and Arabic!
Seriously, you don’t want to pass these up.
2. Conclusion
The best way to learn Arabic through YouTube is to not try too hard. When you step outside of a curated space like a course, you’re opening yourself up to potential inaccuracies in your content or learning from people who don’t really know how to teach.
That said, the big advantage of working with natural Arabic content is that you’ll rapidly develop your listening skills, and over time you’ll pick up a lot of the nuances of natural Arabic speech.
The best middle ground, then, is a combination of these free resources and ArabicPod101. Our podcast lessons guide you through the hardest parts of Arabic grammar and vocabulary, helping you along the way with features like flashcards to help you train your brain.
As you learn new words through our podcast lessons, you should also be regularly watching things in Arabic and looking for your new phrases. Seeing what you learned appear “in the wild” is a great way to make sure the memories stick.
Then before you know it, you’ll be following along with an Arabic video and not even needing to look up a single word. That’s when you know your Arabic has reached great heights.
Which one of these Arabic YouTube channels interests you the most? Do you know of any good ones we missed? Let us, and your fellow learners, know in the comments!
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