For the really advanced students of Media Arabic I have created the Advanced Level (AL).
The texts of the Advanced Level (AL) follow the concept of the MATC, but there are some important differences between the Intermediate (First) Level (IL) and the Advanced Level (AL). These differences are primarily based on the fact that for an advanced user a limited number of tips should suffice. A more practical reason is the enormous amount of time it takes to add all the information to the texts of the MATC. Longer texts of the AL with the same amount of detailed info as in the IL texts would require an unsurmountable amount of time for me.
The Advanced Level contains 10 texts covering the political situation in Tunisia in 2021 and 2022.
To try the AL, click on the subset AL Media Texts on the Home page of the MATC.
As for the differences between Advanced Level (AL) and the Intermediate Level (IL), these are:
Vocabulary buildup will be accumulative (see explanation below)
Texts are longer
Texts can be expanded with additional texts or videos
Some tabs do not contain text
Proper names: only indicated if absolutely necessary
Information about syntactic structures only on the 'complex level'
Info on lexical and syntactic difficulty on About Tab
I will explain these differences in more detail below.
Vocabulary buildup will be accumulative
In the Advanced Level (AL) we will work with an Accumulative Reference Vocabulary (ARV). This term may need some explanation.
The reference vocabulary is the list of words we assume the user already knows at the beginning of the AL. This implicates that words from that list occurring in a text are not provided with a gloss because the user is supposed to have memorised this word already. Accumulative Reference Vocabulary means that a gloss is given only once, when a word occurs for the first time in a text. Since the word is given only once, we strongly advise you to memorise all new words. For that purpose we have created a course in the Memrise vocabulary training app. If a word is polysemous, i.e. it has more than one meaning, a gloss will be provided if in a specific context the word has another meaning that differs from the meaning already given in the ARV.
This accumulative approach implies that the user should proceed through the AL according to the order of presentation of the texts: ADV001, ADV002 etc. Following this order of the texts and the levels in the Memrise course accordingly will result in the best vocabulary buildup without gaps in the vocabulary knowledge of the user.
For the Advanced Level of the MATC, the Reference Vocabulary consists of the following two components:
the Top Media Vocabulary (TMV) of 2600 words. You can read all about it on this page. I have created a Memrise course for this list.
all glosses of the texts in the subsets PAL (Palestine) and TUN (Tunisia) from the Intermediate Level of the MATC (about 400 unique glosses). A Memrise course containing these glosses is available.
To summarise in relation to the Memrise app:
A group of courses Top Media Vocabulary 1-5 (2600 words) is available. The name of the group is Top Media Arabic Vocabulary 2600 words. The link will lead you to the first course, containing highly frequent (easy?) words. You can also start using a higher level course 2, 3, 4 or 5, depending on your present vocabulary knowledge.
Texts are longer
Texts in the AL are significantly longer, up to 1000 words in some cases. A text can consist of only one article, or sometimes a combination of some articles all treating the same topic in chronological order.
Texts can be expanded with additional texts or videos
Texts can be provided with various types of additional material. In some cases I have decided to 'draw a line' in a text to present the remaining part of the text as 'material for further reading' without providing the usual information for this remaining part of a text.
In other cases I will present a text about the same events from a different source, again without the usual supportive information (glosses, syntactic tips, translation). You can use an additional text to read about the same topic, hopefully with much of the same terminology, but in alternative phrasing.
A third type of additional information is a link to a video on the Al Jazeera website. The link will lead you to the original page from which the text was copied, and on that page you will find a link (or more than one) to a video fragment, or a complete programme that was broadcast by Al Jazeera. You can use these videos to improve your listening skills by listening to sound fragments about which you already have read a text, which implies the content of the video should sound familiar to you.
If in the course of time the video's are no longer available on the AJ website, I can upload the video's since I have downloaded them to safeguard their availability. Is the video no longer available? Send me an email at: readingarabicmedia at gmail dot com.
Some tabs do not contain text
The About tab contains the same info as on the Intermediate Level
The tab 'Plain Text' contains an unvowelled version of the text. There is also a pdf version available for downloading through the button 'Download'
The tab 'Vowelled Text' is empty in the AL. It is obious the advanced learner of Arabic has to get used to reading Arabic without vowels.
The tab 'Vocabulary Info' works exactly the same as in the IL (but with an accumulative Reference Vocabulary, as described above).Full vowels will not be given for new words if morphological info (about particples, masdars, root) is sufficiently available.
The tab 'Syntactic Info' works exactly the same as in the IL (but with less syntactic tips, read below)
The tab 'Vocabu/Syntax' works exactly the same as in the IL (with remarks mentioned in the two lines above)
The tab 'Phraseology' works exactly the same as in the IL although repeating collocations are not indicated every time they occur. There is no table with phraseology available for downloading. So collocations are presented in blue, multi word expressions in orange. As an advanced learner you should be able to understand what type of relationship exists between the blue words. It may be useful to read the page about phraseology and collocations before proceding with the Advanced Level of the MATC.
Of course you can always consult the translation of the text on the Translation tab to find out the meaning of indicated collocations and multi word expressions.
The tab 'Connectors' is empty in the AL.
The tab 'Questions' is empty in the AL.
The tab 'Translation' works exactly the same as in the IL. Translations were made with help of Google Translate.
Proper names: only indicated if absolutely necessary
Proper names of persons or entities will be indicated less abundantly. As an advanced learner of Arabic you will have to learn to deal with the fact that Arabic has no capital letters. Only the first occurrence of names may be indicated. Names of famous people like heads of state may not be indicated at all, certainly not if introduced by a title like president, king, mister etc. Toponyms will not be indicated if they are introduced as 'the city of..., the ... river etc.'
Information about syntactic structures only on the 'complex level'
Assuming the user of the Advanced Level qualifies as an 'advanced learner of Arabic' there should be no need to supply syntactic tips of the easier levels. So only the tips from the 'complex level' are supplied. In some cases I may decide to add a tip from a lower level, because the context justifies this.
Passive verbs (category V1) are only indicated if the unvowelled text does not show the verb should be read as passive. This means that passive verbs from derived stems, or verbs containg weak readicals, may not be indicated as passive because the spelling already indicates the passiveness of the verb. Examples: يشار، قيل. qîla is the passive of qâla, yushâru is the passive of yushîru.
Info on lexical and syntactic difficulty on About Tab
The index of the lexical and syntactic difficulty as presented in the About Tab can only be compared within the AL between the texts of the AL. Given the accumulative character of the Reference Vocabulary, the relative number of glosses should decrease. Given the fact that only syntactic tips of the complex level are supplied, the relative number of tips is lower in the AL, and consequently it is not possible to compare the syntactic difficulty of the AL texts with the Intermediate Level texts.
