Our Studies

Program Tracks

• Modern Standard Arabic (MSA): From zero to advanced reading and writing with authentic media, newspapers, and literature.
• Levantine Dialect: Damascus-centered colloquial Arabic for everyday life, field work, and diplomacy.
• Professional Arabic: Terminology and scenarios for business, NGOs, journalism, and public sector roles.
• Qur’anic & Classical Arabic: Textual analysis, morphology, and rhetoric for scholars and serious learners.
• Online Fast-Track: Instructor-led remote cohorts with weekly feedback and progress dashboards.

How We Teach

• Input → Practice → Output: Short theory bursts, task-based practice, then speaking or writing with measurable goals.
• Micro-assessments: Weekly formative checks that adjust pace and content automatically.
• Corpus-first materials: Lessons built from real speech and text corpora from Damascus and the broader Levant.
• Culture in context: Idioms, registers, and etiquette embedded in role-play and city scenarios.

Research & Projects

• Dialect Mapping Lab: Student teams annotate phonetic variation across neighborhoods of Damascus.
• Media Arabic Workshop: Bias, framing, and terminology analysis across Arabic news outlets.
• EdTech Pipeline: Open-source tools for spaced repetition, Arabic OCR cleanup, and handwriting practice.

Outcomes

• Speaking: Functional fluency for daily life in 8–12 weeks for beginners who complete assigned practice.
• Reading: From decode to opinion pieces within one term in the MSA track.
• Certification: End-of-term assessments mapped to CEFR A1–C1 with a detailed skill report.

Sample Study Modules

1. Survival Levantine: Greetings, directions, bargaining, and clinic visits.
2. MSA Newsroom: Headlines, economy, conflict reporting, and editorials.
3. Heritage & Literature: Poetry meters, proverbs, and short-story circles.