How to Learn Levantine Arabic

Arabic Dialect Resources > Learn Levantine Arabic

Start with Live Lingua. Its Foreign Service Institute courses are free, cover Syrian, Jordanian and Levantine separately, and come with real audio and a downloadable book. Buy something only once you know which of the four countries you are learning for — that choice decides your course, and most courses will not say plainly which country they teach.

This page is about choosing. If you want to know what Levantine Arabic is, how many people speak it and how the qaf is pronounced, our Levantine Arabic page covers that and has 38 recordings you can play.

Pick a country first, then a course

Levantine is one dialect continuum across four countries, so whichever variety you learn will carry you through the others. But courses are written for one country, and buying the wrong one means months of vocabulary you will not hear where you are going. Pick the country you have a reason to pick: family, a job, a place you are moving to.

Each of the four has its own page with the full resource list and how the local speech differs.

• Syrian Arabic — the deepest pool of courses and drama, and the variety Pimsleur and the FSI courses teach.
• Lebanese Arabic — closest to Syrian, with the most music and the most YouTube teaching.
• Palestinian Arabic — the best served by academic textbooks.
• Jordanian Arabic — Amman is the region hub for Arabic study programmes and tutors.
• Jordanian Arabic region by region — how Amman, the north, the south, Aqaba and the Bedouin desert differ from each other.

Still undecided between Levantine and something else entirely? Which Arabic dialect to learn compares all thirteen.

Levantine courses and books compared

Every result on page one of Google for "learn Levantine Arabic" is a single course selling itself. None of them tells you which country speech it teaches, or whether it writes Arabic in Arabic letters. Both matter, and both are hard to find out before you have paid. Here they are side by side.

The script column is the one people regret. A course written entirely in transliteration will get you speaking faster and will leave you unable to read a text message.

How we chose, and what to skip

The test for this page was simple: can we say which country Arabic a resource actually teaches? Anything advertising itself as "Levantine" without naming a country got read more carefully, because that word covers four accents and a lot of vocabulary that does not travel.

Two we would not start with. Conversational Arabic Quick and Easy contains no Arabic letters at all, which makes it a phrasebook rather than a course; fine for a two-week trip, a dead end for anything longer. Speaking Arabic: A Course in Conversational Eastern Arabic is the most complete course here and we do recommend it, but it is expensive and also transliteration-only, so it works best alongside something that teaches you to read rather than instead of it.

The free option beats most of the paid ones for a beginner. The FSI and DLI courses on Live Lingua were built to get diplomats speaking, they include the audio, and they cost nothing.

Resources by dialect

The full lists below are what we recommend for each variety. Because the four overlap so heavily, it is worth reading all four whichever one you settle on; several resources, such as "Shou fi ma fi?" and the free Live Lingua courses, cover more than one country. For listening practice, our page of Arabic cartoons, TV shows and films marks which series are Levantine and which are fusha.

Jordanian Arabic

Lebanese Arabic

Palestinian Arabic

Syrian Arabic

Frequently asked questions

Which Levantine dialect should I pick?

Pick the variety spoken by the people you will actually talk to; family ties, a job posting, or a heritage connection beats any other criterion. If nothing points you to one country, Syrian and Lebanese offer the deepest pools of media to learn from, while Jordanian benefits from Amman being a hub for Arabic study programs and tutors. The differences are small enough that whichever variety you learn transfers to the other three with little effort.

Can Levantine speakers understand Egyptian Arabic?

Yes. Decades of Egyptian films and music made Egyptian Arabic familiar across the whole Arab world, so Levantine speakers follow it with ease. The reverse also works well: Syrian drama and Lebanese pop have given Levantine a similar reach, and Egyptians generally understand it without trouble. Egyptian and Levantine are the two most widely understood dialect families, which is a large part of why most learners choose one of them.

Is Levantine Arabic close to MSA?

Closer than the Maghrebi dialects of North Africa, but still a real step away. Levantine shares most of its core vocabulary with Modern Standard Arabic, which is why it is often recommended to learners who already have MSA. The grammar is simpler, though: case endings are gone, the present tense takes a b- prefix, and urban speakers pronounce the classical qaf as a glottal stop. MSA alone will not carry a street conversation in Beirut or Amman, but an MSA foundation makes Levantine much faster to pick up.

How different are Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Jordanian Arabic?

They form one dialect continuum, usually split into a northern branch (Syrian and Lebanese) and a southern branch (Jordanian and Palestinian). The differences show up in accent and intonation, a handful of everyday words, and how the qaf is pronounced; many Jordanian men use a hard g where a Beirut speaker uses a glottal stop, for example. Speakers from all four countries converse freely with each other, and learners can mix resources from any of them without confusion.

Explore each Levantine dialect

• In this topicJordanian Arabic, our dedicated guide to the dialect spoken in Amman and across Jordan
• In this topicLebanese Arabic resources, for the dialect of Beirut, carried worldwide by Lebanese music and television
• In this topicPalestinian Arabic resources, for the southern Levantine variety closest to Jordanian
• In this topicSyrian Arabic resources, for the Damascus speech that pan-Arab drama made familiar across the region
• In this topicLevantine Arabic guide, our introduction to the dialect family with audio recordings of common phrases
• Up one levelArabic dialect resources, the hub covering every regional dialect we have guides for