How to start learning Lebanese Arabic

Learning a language is not easy. It takes months, and then years. But it doesn’t need to be complicated.

Say you wanted to learn salsa. You studied every move and every position, and how to lead a partner. You studied photos of the footwork and the history of the dance, until you could describe any step from a picture. You did this for four years, but you never danced. If I asked you to dance right now, you couldn’t.

Dancing is something you do, not something you know. It’s intuitive, instinctual, instant. Language works the same way: knowing about it is not the same as being able to use it.1

How you actually learn a language

You learn a language by understanding it. Speech and text you can mostly follow are the raw material your brain acquires a language from.2 Understanding alone isn’t enough, though. Plenty of people understand a language well and still can’t speak it. Speaking makes you notice what you can’t say yet, so it needs its own practice.3

You learn by engaging with the language, not just being exposed to it. The more work you do with a word, like looking it up, deciding what it means, or using it in your own sentence, the better you remember it.4, 5

I’ve spent years trying different methods. Don’t waste your time looking for the perfect technique. If you engage with the language every day and you speak it, you will learn it.

Train three skills separately

Learning Lebanese Arabic comes down to three skills:

• Listening
• Reading
• Speaking

They grow at different rates. You can read well and still speak poorly. You can follow a conversation easily and still be slow to read and slow to answer. Practice mostly improves the skill you practise: comprehension practice builds comprehension, and speaking practice builds speaking.6 So give each one its own time, on purpose.

What to do every day

Advice on learning a language is usually broad. It rarely tells you what to actually do when you sit down to study. This is what I do.

How long you study matters less than studying every day. The same hours spread over many days are remembered far better than hours crammed together.7

1. Find a tutor

   Book regular sessions with a Lebanese tutor on italki or Preply, or find one on Reddit, where plenty of people offer lessons. A tutor gives you real conversation with someone who notices your mistakes and corrects them while you speak. That kind of interaction reliably speeds up learning.8

2. Use Pimsleur

   Pimsleur gets you speaking from the first lesson. It asks you to say a phrase, waits for your answer, then brings the phrase back at growing intervals.9 Recalling something again and again, spaced out over time, is one of the best-supported findings in memory research.7, 10 Saying the same useful phrases over and over is what makes them automatic.

   Two caveats. Pimsleur teaches Eastern (Levantine) Arabic, not Lebanese specifically, so some words will differ from what you hear in Beirut. And its schedule of growing gaps is not better than evenly spaced review; what matters is that you recall the phrase again after a delay.11

   For Lebanese verbs, Cedarly’s verb audio course uses the same format: a prompt, a pause for your answer, then the answer.

3. Learn vocabulary

   Most people don’t recommend this. It’s boring, it takes time, and words are hard to learn out of context. That’s fair. Still, it has worked for me. To swim, you first need to be able to tread water. A base of familiar words can pay off elsewhere: you’ll keep running into them, and the more words in a sentence you know, the more often you can work out the rest from context.12 It can make your tutor sessions and Pimsleur easier too. Studying words on purpose, with cards, does have research behind it,13 but it can be quite boring. If it’s too boring for you, skip it and put the time into the other steps.

   On Cedarly, save words from the translator, dictionary and reader, then review them in Flashcards. Ten new words a day is about 900 in three months.

   What does it mean to learn a word? Honestly, you won’t fully know most of them. Word knowledge grows in stages: first you recognise a word, later you understand it in context, and later still you can use it yourself.14 Daily cards build familiarity, and familiarity is still very useful. Be wary of anyone who promises a set number of words in a set number of days.

4. Practise with native speakers

   HelloTalk is good for this. You’ll have the same exchanges over and over with new people: the same greetings, the same replies, the same questions about where you’re from. That repetition is the point. Fluent speech is built largely from ready-made phrases like these,15 and repeating the same exchange makes you faster at it.16 When you meet a Lebanese person in real life, the greeting and the reply come out automatically. Over time, some of these chats turn into real friendships.

   Keep Cedarly’s English to Lebanese translator open while you chat. When you want to say something and don’t know how, type it in English and get it in Lebanese Arabic script, with Arabizi alongside on Pro. Google Translate can’t do this. Ask it for Arabic and you get Modern Standard Arabic, the formal written language, which sounds stiff in a casual chat. When a word comes up that you don’t know, look it up in the dictionary.

5. Skip Duolingo

   Duolingo won’t teach you Lebanese. Its Arabic course teaches Modern Standard Arabic, not the dialect.17 The bigger problem is how it tests you. Most exercises ask you to recognise the right answer: pick one word out of four, by elimination or because it looks familiar.

   Recognition is not fluency. Recognising a word is the easiest kind of word knowledge; recalling it on your own is much harder, and learners manage the first long before the second.18 Picking a word out of four options doesn’t mean it will come to you in a taxi or at a restaurant. Practising recall is what builds recall.10

Common questions