What does Arabic Pod 101 have for learning Arabic reading skills?
Arabic is a really hard language to learn and the difficulty is not just about how you speak it but also how you read it. Arabic Pod has several different ways to improve your reading skills.
On the website, there is a list of the vocabulary with the Arabic and romanisation and English below. On the website the new words are in Arabic with the romanisation (latin alphabet letters) next to it.
Every lesson on Arabic Pod 101 has a script that you can download in PDF format and this way you can easily follow what is being talked about. In the PDF script provided by Arabic Pod 101, you can also follow a line-by-line transcript. This is a way of checking if your reading skills are as good as your listening skills. You can read the PDF document while listening to the audio, and pay attention to how the Arabic words are spelled and written. In the PDF transcript it’s very clever as in the introduction the romanisation is used. For the dialogue, the Arabic text is used without romanisation.
If at first you don’t understand the Arabic audio you can later check the script and even discover new words because everything is written in the transcripts. All these are good exercises both for newbie learners of Arabic as well as more advanced learners.
There is also a resource on the Arabic alphabet so that you can learn how to read and pronounce the letters. Arabic Pod doesn’t have any text to read that isn’t part of the audio/video lessons so you may consider when you get to an intermediate/advanced learner stage looking at other reading material as well.
In conclusion: Arabic Pod has a big library of video and audio lessons but in terms of reading lessons, this doesn’t seem to be the main focus of their website. Arabic Pod 101 is focused on learning to speak and listen to Arabic and improving your Arabic very quickly and at this job it does very well. There is nothing wrong with the reading lessons it’s just a different approach.
