More Arabic Today

Original title, right? Really creative? So, this should really be an addendum to this morning's post, but what the hell, it's not like I'm going to come anywhere close to surpassing Chops' posts, so I may as well make a whole new one.

So, after I posted this morning, I had a chance to listen to a couple of things. These included a BBC Xtra podcast about "piracy" (which talked a lot more about telephones) and the forty-fourth سورة (sura) of القرآن (the Quran) - titled الدخان‎ (ad Dukhan, "The Smoke").

So, yesterday I mentioned the Basic Iraqi Survival Guide. This was a booklet and CD that were produced by the Defense Language Institute a few years ago. I have two copies of the booklet and one copy of the CD. Just out of curiosity, I Googled "basic Iraqi survival guide" and had a pleasant "holy shit!" moment: booyeah! It has the following Arabic dialects available:

Egyptian

Gulf

Iraqi

Moroccan

Sudanese

Syrian

Tunisian

For each of these categories, the site features a booklet and CD download for:

a basic language survival guide/kit

a medical language survival kit

a civil affairs language survival kit

an air crew language survival kit

a navy language survival kit

And, in addition to the various Arabic dialects, they have materials for Azeri, Dari, French, Hebrew, Kashmiri, Afghan Pashto, Farsi, Peshawari Pashto, Sindhi, Urdu, and Uzbek, among others. My plan? Download all of them that I could possibly foresee myself needing, study the Arabic ones, and archive the rest.

So, that having been said, I'll count today as a win as far as studying Arabic goes, too.