Latest News
Latest news always at the top of this page.
Latest news about: CATCMATC
November 2024
All links to Memrise vocabulary training courses have been restored
March 2024
Soon I will be able to show some sneak previews of the brand new set of two dictionaries Dutch-Moroccan Arabic and Moroccan Arabic-Dutch.
I am currently very busy proofreading >800 pages with dictionary entries.
The dictionaries will appear in a few months, probably in May 2024.
Publisher is Amsterdam University Press (AUP).
Stay tuned!
March 2024
4 New SHO-texts were added to MATC
Again advanced level, so limited information, see last posting below (February 2024)
SHO014 Environment 1, 575 words
SHO015 Diplomacy, 270 words
SHO016 Military, 840 words
SHO017 Environment 2, 720 words
February 2024
It has been a while since I added new materials to the Media Arabic Text Collection.
Recentely I have started to add some new Texts containing Short texts, since I had realized that the great number of short texts I have collected from the Al Ahram website in 2015-2016 make up a great collection of short texts that can be used by advanced learners of Arabic either to expand their knowledge of Arabic or to maintain their knowledge.
These short texts are perfect to regularly (daily?) spend just a few minutes on learning or maintaining Arabic.
So I decided to expand the subset of 'Short Texts' but in a less time consuming way (for me). Therefore I decided to provide additional texts, but with less information in the various tabs, just as I did in the 'Advanced Level' media texts (see subset Advanced Level Media Texts).
Starting from text SHO012 (letter O and number zero) there will only be content in the following 4 tabs:
- About
- Plain text
- Syntactic info
- Translation
I have recently added two texts in this new advanced format:
- SHO012, short texts on Health 1 (more texts on this theme will follow)
- SHO013, short texts on Migration
I wish the users lots of succes in expanding their knowledge of Arabic
16 December 2022
I have added the Qâmûs al-darija al-maghribiya, a remarkable dictionary of Moroccan Arabic to the collection of Written Moroccan Arabic.
25 November 2022
New content: Collocations and Expressions in Media Arabic (MATC).
All phraseology (collocations and multi word expressions) from the 10 Advanced Level texts of the Media Arabic Text Collection (MATC) are now available in different forms:
- in the Excel database containing all phraseology from the MATC
- downloadable pdf tables with the 10 texts of the Advanced Level of MATC
Excel database:
The database is available for download here (also as pdf, see image):
https://cronebbj.home.xs4all.nl/Collocations.html
The database now contains over 1600 collocations and can be sorted and filtered in different ways.
12 July 2022
I have added 3 more texts to the advanced level (AL) of the MATC.
The AL now contains 10 texts.
These 10 texts contain almost 7000 words.
With these 10 texts the AL level is complete and any user of the MATC who has completed all texts of the Intermediate Level and the Advanced Level, who has internalised all vocabulary of the glosses, will be fully equiped to start reading Arabic media texts on her/his own without the help of glosses, syntactic tips, translations or whatsoever.
All texts of the AL cover the political situation in Tunisia between the summer of 2021 and 2022.
21 June 2022
Text ADV007 in Advanced Level of MATC is now available. 1000 words, Topic: Escalating political crisis in Tunisia, October 2021
Text ALF019 in the Classical Arabic Text Collection is now available in final form, i.e. corrections have been carried out. Text ALF019 is a long text and can be considered the 'piece de résistance' of the first level of the CATC, the collection of stories from Alf Layla wa Layla (Arabian Nights).
8 June 2022
New text ADV006 in the Advanced Level of the MATC.
Text 19 in the CATC (a long and interesting text) will soon be available in its final version.
On my Vimeo video channel you can see more slideshows of written Moroccan Arabic (WMA).
16 May 2022
2 new texts in the Advanced Level of MATC:
ADV004 – Marzouki responds to the developments in Tunisia
800 words, contains a link to a video on the AJ website
ADV005 – Marzouki: president must resign or be fired
44 words, contains a link to a video on the AJ website, text is completed with two text from another source about the same topic.
This other source is the Moroccan website Lakome.
The CATC has in the meantime grown to 18 texts and is nearing completion (20 texts).
But the next phase is already being prepared: 20 texts from Murûj adh-Dhahab by Al-Mas'ûdî. This next phase will certainly be more challenging but progress in reading skills of the learner of (Classical) Arabic is the main purpose of the CATC.
23 March 2022
A new text in the Advanced Level of the MATC:
ADV003: Democratic crisis in Tunisia (2nd half 2021)
Nr of words: 780
Nr of glosses: 47
Nr of syntactic tips: 20
Actually the text is considerably longer but the 'for further reading part' is presented without glosses, tips and translation.
In the CATC a new text is available:
There is a new Classical Arabic text available, from 1001 Nights: ALF15: The monks who converted to Islam
It is a rather long (and interesting) story of 1000 words.
I have created a Facebook page for the MATC and CATC.
This is a new instrument to keep the users informed about latest developments in both text collections.
If you give this page a like, you will also be informed. I also intend to regularly post some additional information or interesting tips and links.
Address of the Facebookpage: https://www.facebook.com/MATCandCATC
23 February 2022 Two new stories from Alf Layla wa Layla are available in the Classical Arabic Text Collection CATC:
ALF013
ALF014
14 texts (8350 words) are available with all supporting materials (downloadable files, vocabulary training in Memrise).
28 January 2022
Two new texts in the CATC:
ALF011: The story of a man who had a bad wife, 316 words
ALF012: The simpleton and the two villains, 500 words
CATC now contains 12 texts from Alf Layla wa Layla containing 7200 words.
27 January 2022
I have created a Facebook page for the MATC and CATC.
This is a new instrument to keep the users informed about latest developments in both text collections.
If you give this page a like, you will also be informed. I also intend to regularly post some additional information or interesting tips and links.
Address of the Facebookpage: https://www.facebook.com/MATCandCATC
26 January 2022
To help you memorise the words of the Top Media Vocabulary (TMV) I have created a group of courses in the online vocabulary training platform Memrise. This tool consists of a group of 5 courses (grouped together in the group Top Media Arabic Vocabulary 2600 words) containing all words of the Top Media Vocabulary, a list of 2560 words as described above.
This link will lead you to the first course.
Another Memrise course contains all words that were provided with glosses in the reading texts of the Intermediate (First) Level of the MATC from the subsets PAL (Palestine) and TUN (Tunisia). This is the course Media Arabic Text Collection Intermediate Level, which contains 400 words based on the same number of 400 unique glosses, created to explain the meaning of words that are not part of the TMV.
11 January 2022
New items were added to the collection of texts written in Moroccan Darija.
Go to the end of that page to read about the last items added to the collection.
I added some texts from the corpus I used for my MA Thesis in 1983. The texts were written in the Netherlands before 1983.
11 January 2022
Two new texts are available in the collection of stories from the Arabian Nights (Alf Layla wa Layla):
Story ALF009:The rich man who became poor and rich again, 275 words
Story ALF010: A man from the Banu ‘Udhra, 306 words.
With 10 texts available, half of the Alf Layla texts is now available. These 10 texts contain 6400 words.
The number of new vocabulary items of these 10 texts is 650. So an average of 1 new vocabulary item on every 10 words of the texts. All these new vocabulary items were incorporated in the Memrise course for vocabulary training.
======================== 2 January 2022
Happy New Year to all visitors of these pages.
سنة سعيدة وكل عام وأنتم بخير
In CATC two new texts are available now: ALF007 and ALF008.
In the Memrise course "Arabic Vocabulary in Arabian Nights" the vocabulary of all glosses of all texts is now available: 585 words.
Sometimes we upload a file to the CATC in the correction stage. You may notice this because in that case there is a warning on top of the page: WARNING: this is not the final version of this text, it may need some corrections.
======================== 24 December 2021
Text ALF007 was added to the CATC
Text SHO011 was added to the MATC
======================== 21 December 2021 I have created a group of 4 courses on the MEMRI platform containing the 2000 words of the Basic Vocabulary we assume the user already knows as a starting vocabulary for reading the stories in the CATC.
In other words, if a word from that Basic Vocabulary occurs in a text, we will not provide a gloss to explain the meaning of that word.
MEMRI is a platform for vocabulary build up training. Words are presented and progress of the student is tested while learning.
These 2000 words of the Arabic Basic Vocabulary were selected from the Buckwalter/Parkinson Frequency Dictionary of Arabic.
Link to the first Memrise course: https://community-courses.memrise.com/community/course/6123264/arabic-basic-vocabulary-1-first-500-words/
======================== 20 December 2022
Two new texts in CATC available: ALF005 and ALF006.
Total number of texts is now 6, total number of words is 5.200.
Memrise vocabulary training levels for all texts are available. Total number of new words in 6 texts: 545.
======================== 10 December 2021
Launch of Classical Arabic Text Collection CATC
The CATC was launched with 4 texts from the Alf Layla wa Layla collection. More stories will follow.
Try the CATC with this link.
Read all about the CATC with this link.
======================== 1 December 2021
New items added in the collection of Written Moroccan Arabic
Example pages were added from the magazines Khbar bladna and Al-'Amal and from a very special book called Code de la Route.
