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Show HN: Parallel Arabic – Arabic reading and writing practice

parallel-arabic.com

98 pointsselmetwa54 comments

I have made a website called Parallel Arabic which enables users to read arabic texts alongside the same text in English.

Each story features a dictionary of key words, transliteration of the text, and full native audio recordings, creating a fully self-contained learning environment without the need for outside resources. https://parallel-arabic.com/stories

There is also a section for writing where you can practice writing over 4000 words, with realtime spellchecking. The tool contains a fully featured Arabic virtual keyboard, built for english speaker

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I never touched a line of source code until after college. In college I studied history, focusing on the "Middle East" [1]. I took 3 years of Arabic in a (failed) attempt to use Arabic texts as primary sources in my thesis. Short story long, something about the highly structured and patterned nature of Arabic primed my mind for programming and made me more likely to enjoy programming. If you're looking for a pure intellectual pursuit, akin to how people recommend studying math just for the new ways of thinking that it provides, I heartily recommend studying Arabic

[1] Historians often call attention to that phrase because it has controversial history and connotations

You might enjoy this blog post which (after a few paragraphs) is about a programming language structured around roots similarly to how Arabic is structured: https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2024/03/31/ed-catmurs-tri...

The triliteral root system is exactly the thing about Arabic that fascinated me and probably primed me for programming. Thanks for sharing.

I agree it's super great. Every word has a little cloud of associations to go with it.

Speaking of languages with an affinity to a specific characteristic, Urdu - a mix of Persian, Arabic, Hindi, Sanskrit - is another language that somehow seems "naturally" suited for romance and poetry (it's called the the language of poets in the indian subcontinent). The Mughal rulers of India who popularised it were huge patrons of arts, and thus there is large trove of literature and poems in Urdu.

Good work. I think you will need to add to the website that you mean Egyptian Arabic dialect. Also on safari mobile there is problem rendering the word character during writing.

I couldn't find stories other than omar's. Is there more or this just what is available now?

Also if you are using Franco in the sentence view, I would suggest defining the alphabetical definition of characters because they are not standard there. Specially outside Egyptian arabic.

Thanks for the feedback, definitely need to polish the mobile experience. And yeah as of now just the one story as a POC, I plan on adding more in the future.

I’m of Lebanese heritage and grew up speaking, reading and writing Arabic but then moved to Australia and never looked back for over 20 years. I’m slowly losing my ability to speak Arabic so I make a point of doing so when speaking to my parents nowadays. I also really love that tools like this exist so I can refresh myself. It’s a very sad thing to lose one’s mother tongue. I know it’s not the same dialect since it’s Egyptian but it’s easy enough to tell apart when I started reading. Still helpful!

As a Palestinian living in North America for over 20 years, I totally hear you about it being a sad thing. Feels heartbreaking and scary to me, given that it was part of my identity.

> Feels heartbreaking and scary to me, given that it was part of my identity.

I took two years of a language, merely for enjoyment, and it saddens me now that I've neglected to maintain my studies that I've lost most of what I learned. I get frustrated looking at sentences where in my prime I would have been able to sight translate with ease. I can imagine it's offers of magnitude worse to feel something similar with ones own native language, starting to struggle to use the language with which you had your first thoughts.

I moved right about 10 years ago, kamen min lebnen :)

It’s actually a major thing I think about especially when it comes to any kids I might have.

I speak Arabic (Syrian) natively and I think this is great! Good work!

I agree with other comments that it might be helpful to mention somewhere that this is colloquial Egyptian Arabic. I can tell the difference easily but might be difficult for those who don't speak Arabic at all. But I like Egyption Arabic and I think it's weirdly more suitable for short stories like yours!

One more thing regarding the Arabic keyboard layout, I think it's a bit strange. I'm not sure if it's something specific to a locale or a layout I'm not familiar with, but I think most common layout is "Arabic 101", something like this[1][2]. You can find more details regarding the layout on Wikipedia[3].

Another small thing, on Firefox the "Listen" button doesn't seem to work. I see "Playing" in the tab name but I hear nothing.

1] https://imgur.com/a/Hmt8GZh

2] https://kbdlayout.info/KBDA1/

3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_keyboard

Ah the keyboard was designed specifically for native english speakers, mapping the english letters to their closest approximate arabic equivalent.

For example s = س

This seems to be the Egyptian dialect, not standard Arabic.

That is correct, I should have been more specific

Wicked cool! I like this format of practice. Just found a small bug though. The click-to-translate for a given word seems to miss the target of click somewhere. It's translating عُمَر and سَارة as listen (and in the latter case the click gets `وسَارة` instead of just سَارة.)

Ah, "Listen" is actually a button you can click to hear the audio. Only keywords (those highlighted) actually have the translation included.

ohhh haha. I just realized that. I clicked on madina first so when I clicked elsewhere I assumed it was the same element and I didn't notice the style difference. User error!

For someone like myself, the biggest challenge will always be that the alphabet (abjad?) is unfamiliar. I am aware that it's rtl, and that letters are connected (and have different initial, medial, and terminal forms... as in Greek sigma, or some Hebrew letters). This would be accessible to more people if you included something to learn it first. I've discovered that once I do learn an alphabet, I can pick out cognates and other such words enough to make that worthwhile even if I go no further. I was planning on devanagari or hangul next though.

Source code is here for anyone curious: https://github.com/selmetwa/parallel-arabic

I was about to ask whether supporting Egyptian is in the roadmap, then read the comments and I'm happy to discover that's already Egyptian :-)

Im arab myself, hence the username :)

What I find fascinating myself is that no on actually speaks MSA, modern standard arabic. It is mostly used for written text that is meant to last? We dont text in standard arabic at all. Its used in government forms/legal documents etc..

This makes it such a challenge to teach ppl arabic since many books use MSA which can often sound alien to native speakers.

> which can often sound alien to native speakers.

Do you mean alien in terms of being an unusual accent or that it's hard to understand?

Very unusual accent. If you speak in MSA, I have to hold myself from laughing usually.

There are also definitely some words that I’ve never of that arent common in local dialects.

MSA is used in newspaper, news reading and Quran is it not? (35 year migrated Aussie Palestinian here)

https://github.com/selmetwa/parallel-arabic/blob/e1b38771333...

Spelling mistake here - should be "sentences", not "Sentances".

oof, ty lol

One for bookmarking and following, thanks!

Tried learning Arabic from Duolingo for more than a year and loved learning my way around the script at least.

How about using Arabizi as an option for beginners? If oral fluency is sought, being able to read--while nice--isn't absolutely necessary. Arabizi is widely recognized-people who didn't already know the Roman alphabet learned it to text on their phones before smartphones became a thing.

There is an option to view the transliteration next to the arabic and english text as well, you just have to toggle "Sentence view"

I think the purpose of this tool is the opposite. It is aimed at a person who know English and want to learn Arabic. So that people used franco arabic because of lack of Arabic support is another matter. Those were people who already know arabic and how to form words and sentences following its general structure. Also franco is not widely used anymore as before. I would suggest not to start the learning journey using it as a bridge.

Also while therr are dialects in arab world. Most of the people will read and write in formal Arabic which sometime will differ from how you speak. It is rare to speak formal arabic but the norm for reading and writing.

On a personal level, I find it much easier if someone either used English or Arabic to communicate with me. Franco feels like searching for meanings because there is no standard and people will write it differently and in many times you can't know if this was a typo or the problem is that you are old now and cannot keep up with how teenagers use it.

That is correct, this tool assumes a basic understanding of the Arabic alphabet, and I think in the long run being able to read the arabic script will accelerate your learning progress much faster than just using franco.

Arabizi has utilitarian value but if you're learning languages with more than just pratical considerations, I really recommend learning the original Arabic alphabet.

I might be a bit of a romantic here but I think it's amongst the most beautiful I've seen. I am not a native Arab nor am I a Muslim.

I like the format but these seem grammatically incorrect written down in arabic, e.g. missing articles etc, I guess you're going for street Arabic but you should have it in fusha, it's easier to go other way around

Ah yeah I should specify this is in the egyptian dialect

This is great! As someone outgrowing Duolingo this is perfect. I do agree it would be nice to be able to switch between dialects.

This is great. I might finally be able to understand the Egyptian shows.

My Arabic is terrible. In the first lesson I learned a new word!

My Arabic is terrible also haha, part of my impetus for making the tool

this is great - i would love to use this if it had MSA, levantine and egyptian dialects. It's a little annoying that a moving highlight is not present which is also tied to the audio playback. Would you consider implementing this?

That would be a great feature, definitely going to look into how to implement something like that.

Are the readings done via mic + real in the flesh speaker? Or are you using tts?

Using a mic

Both س and ص are transcribed as "s" — is this really a common convention?

There are two characters for t, h, s, d, th, and k.

The two characters for each are pronounced a bit different.

Online or when texting on old phones that didn't have Arabic keyboards, people use numbers that look slightly similar to the letters in Arabic instead, like:

- 7 is ح

- 7' is خ (or 5)

- 2 is ء

- 4 is ذ

- 3 is ع

- 3' is غ

- 9 is ص

- 9' is ض

- 6 is ط

- 6' is ظ

- 8 is ق

Duolingo uses s for س and S for ص, in more formal/academic contexts it's usually s and ṣ.

Super great idea!!

Thank you!

This is Egyptian Arabic

Just note this is not arabic, it's a dialect unfortunately.

All big enough languages have plenty of dialects.

The tool should teach arabic "classic" as it is intended for non arabic speakers.

The issue is that nobody speaks "classic" arabic in day to day life, so its not very useful. The egyptian dialect on the other hand is the most widely spoken dialect and understandable by most arabic speakers.

Media in all forms are full of classic Arabic, so your premise doesn't stand. I've just wanted to make a point on preserving the classic Arabic.

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