So I was wondering, if I ever decide to use the Karavinka/gun-machine/recognition approach to learning MSA, and in particular news in MSA, what resources may I use for sentence mining? I'm only interested in those which have audio.
Euronews (
http://www.euronews.com) used to provide all their news videos with transcripts, but now they seem to have abandoned it for Arabic. I just checked for English, Turkish and Russian, and for these three the text repeats the narration in the videos (with some minor deviations), but for Arabic, they are different.
How about Al-Jazeera? I checked a few news videos on their front page,
http://www.aljazeera.net/ , and no luck, text and narration are different.
Then I checked their learning portal,
http://learning.aljazeera.net/en , and it's even more frustrating: the videos in the "Language of Media" section are accompanied by all kinds of paraphernalia -- vocabulary lists, drag and drop exercises, fill in the missing word exercises, grammar explanations, there is even a button for turning on the subtitles -- but there is no transcript itself! WTF... thought I, and then discovered a little trick: under the video there is a button with the link symbol, clicking on it opens the same video on the main news portal, and most of those do have the transcript.
For example:
'Gaziantep culinary arts center' on Aljazeera Learning, no transcript --
http://learning.aljazeera.net/en//langu ... 8%A7%D8%A8Same video on Aljazeera main portal with the transcript --
http://www.aljazeera.net/programs/newsr ... 9%83%D9%88It's still upsetting because their selection of learning videos is small and boring (mostly about culture). Do you guys know any other news websites in Arabic with videos and transcripts?
It's quite annoying to see so many sophisticated websites for Arabic intended to 'help' learners, but such a basic thing missing. Really guys, who needs your drag and drop stuff? Is it even helpful in the slightest?
Karavinka wrote:Good luck! And it'd be interesting to see how much the rest of the MSA can get unlocked after learning the Qu'ranic roots.
Thanks. I don't know for how long I'll be able to persist with it (as you see my Zaza project has ended rapidly -- or rather has been suspended, I hope).