LangMedia CultureTalk
Whether you’re a student, a teacher, or doing your own thing, LangMedia is a useful tool to incorporate into your studies. The site offers materials from lesson plans to audio recordings to lists of media resources for 53 languages from Afrikaans to Zulu. It’s created by and for the “Five College” community (Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst) but is free and available for everyone. Our favorite part of the website is LangMedia CultureTalk.
CultureTalk is a vast collection of short videos of native speakers talking about common topics in their local dialect. Each video comes with a full transcript in Arabic and an English translation. As many of you have probably found, the way a word is pronounced in colloquial Arabic can be really different from the way it’s spelled, so the transcripts are very useful. Especially for those of us who aren’t great at spelling to begin with. The collection is organized first by country or region and then by topic.
Preparing Dishes for Guests (JO) transcript excerpt
المرأة: بدو يراعي الواحد عدد الأشخاص اللي بدو يعزمهم. بي دعوات على الغدا, أما بدها تكون دعوات رسميه او دعوات لأهل الأسرة, للجيران,
...للأصدقاء..لل..كل مناسبه وإلها انواع معينه من الأكل بدك تحضرها
Woman: One must consider the number of people one invites. For lunch invitations, they are either official invitations or invitations for family, for neighbors, for friends. Each occasion has its own types of dishes to be served...
The videos are low-tech - most are a single person, sitting in a room, and talking with no special equipment. The result is a recording that sounds a lot like it would if you were talking to a person in real life. There’s a bit of background noise, some echo, but it’s clear enough to make out what each person is saying. Listening to clips like this is good practice and makes us more agile listeners and conversationalists.
Navigation of the LangMedia website can be a bit clunky. For example, rather than have one page with all the videos related to education, Schools in Jordan is on a different page than Higher Education in Jordan, which is on a different page than Palestinian Higher Education. And the transcripts are not viewable on the website, you have to download them as separate files. Not ideal, but the navigation hurdles are well-worth it. I have yet to find another resource with this many videos of native speakers talking about everyday topics with transcripts. Had I known about this resource before studying in Jordan, I could have saved myself a couple months of conversational struggle.
