Lebanese Arabic

This is work-in-progress to develop a set of tools for foreigners learning Lebanese Arabic. The idea is that we have:

A Reference Grammar
Bilingual Dictionaries from Lebanese Arabic to some European languages and vice versa
A search functionality that allows you to search for the meaning of a word in Lebanese Arabic and find it in some European language or vice versa.
A word quiz where you would be presented with a word in Lebanese Arabic and have to guess it's meaning in some European language or vice versa.

Quick instructions to be able to properly view these pages:

If you are able to see ALL these characters properly [instead of boxes or weird characters] then you are all set: ḷ, ṃ, ṇ, ṛ, ṭ, ḍ, ẓ, ġ, ʔ, ʕ, š, ž, ː, ʊ.
If not, then check the character encoding you're using (View > [Character] Encoding). It should be set to UTF-8.
If this is still not working, then probably you're using Internet Explorer without having the necessary fonts installed. Our advice would be to use Mozilla Firefox which comes with all necessary fonts installed. Plus it's by far the better browser :)

Reference Grammar

Here you can find the Lebanese Arabic reference grammar I am preparing. Since this work is still in its early stages, your comments will be very influential to improve the quality. Please send me your comments.

This grammar is based on Mark Cowell's book on Syrian Arabic but adapted for Lebanese Arabic and meant to be a shorter and quicker reference. Thanks to Mark Cowell for his great book which is helping me a lot in this work.

Bilingual Dictionaries

These dictionaries are being developed gradually by adding words in several languages to a Google Spreadsheet. The dictionaries are then automatically generated from the spreadsheet using a python script.

The currently supported languages, apart from Lebanese Arabic, are English, French, Spanish, Swedish, and German. If you have comments or corrections to the dictionaries, or if you want to add support to your favorite language, please inform me.

	Lang > Lebanese	Lebanese > Lang
English	en-lb	lb-en
Français	fr-lb	lb-fr
Español	es-lb	lb-es
Deutsch	de-lb	lb-de
Svenska	sv-lb	lb-sv

Word Search and Quiz

These will be developed when we have enough words in the dictionaries for it to make sense to search them. Please inform me when you think these functionalities are important and which is more important (search or quiz).