Wednesday

Memri TV as a learning resource

I'm sure many Arabs will say that Memri TV is biased against the Arab World as it was founded and is run by Jews and it has a tendency to show clips of extremists and those on the fringes of society spouting crazy viewpoints (this guy thinks the Earth is flat and bigger than the Sun), but I'm not going to take a political stance and say whether it is right or wrong. I simply use it as a tool to learn the language. If you haven't heard of Memri, it's a site with over 2000 translated video clips that tries to give English speakers some insight into the Arabic/Muslim mind. They aren't all Arabic clips, but the vast majority are and most of them are pretty interesting. There are clips in MSA as well as all the dialects. You'll learn things about the language and also quite a bit about politics and Arabic/Muslim culture. They don't have the transcripts in Arabic, only in English, which is really the only criticism I have, but I guess their target English speaking audience doesn't really care to see pages of uninteligable squiggles, so it makes sense. It's a goal of mine to watch and make sure I understand all the videos on the site. That's over 2000 videos, but I'm sure if a person were to watch them all it would greatly improve their Arabic. Memri also has a YouTube channel. And here's a crazy guy who thinks that Valentines day is worse than AIDS and that it makes Muhammad sad when you celebrate it. Take heed!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Please don't misunderstand our disguse with Memri. It is not about jew. It's about zionist and only that.
Lot of jews are not zionists. Some are arabs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_cEiHJ1t64

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Trfxfl45o

Anonymous said...

And be sure to listen in good arabic the iraqi former israeli, living in USA naem Giladi

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Trfxfl45o (06:30)

The Arabic Student said...

I couldn't view the last video.

Andrea Karim said...

Ah, the Arabic/Muslim mind. Is that like a hive mind? ;)