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Nice. The writing was a bit difficult to read in the cartoon but text below made it clear. I'll keep practising.

Shukran.

I found the podcast about Arabic handwriting fascinating. Perhaps another podcast might be devoted to this subject. Ehab and Mohamed might be able to conconct an amusing and thought-provoking dialogue between a severe traditionalist and an Arabic-speaking teenager who has no respect for Arabic traditions, spends hours writing silly text messages in the Arabic chat alphabet, and infuriates his neighbours by spraying graffiti (also in the chat alphabet) on the walls of their houses.

On 12 March 2010 an excellent article entitled “Lost in Arabic” was posted on the website of the “Deutsche Welle”. The article, which is in German, deals with the decline of literary Arabic and the spread of a new language called “Arabizi”. Arabizi is full of anglicisms and regionalisms and is disseminated via graffiti, text messages and Internet documents written in the Arabic chat alphabet. According to the author (Mona Sarkis), many young people in Arabic-speaking countries are unable to cope with the intricacies of Arabic grammar and orthography and even have difficulty in using Arabic keyboards.

I never heard of the term Arabizi before. People used Latin letters to write Arabic when mobile phones started appearing in Arab countries before supporting Arabic language. Now, as all phones in the middle east do support Arabic, it seems things are changing, especially that it can be confusing to use Latin letters as they lack in covering all Arabic letters, and the numerical method is not agreed upon very well.

The term "Arbizi" was new to me too, Ehab. It is a combination of "Arabic" and "easy". "Arbizi" is such a recent coinage that it hasn't yet found its way into Wikipedia. I can send you a copy of the article by e-mail if you like.

Hi guys - this and your recent cooking lower intermediate lesson are not showing on ITunes for download yet. Just wondering if there may be a change in policy. I'm a premium member of your site, but I like to download through ITunes. By the way, do like the format of your new site very much. -- Charles

All right - I guess you're not posting anything but Beginner on ITunes anymore. Will download from here - but wish there were a way to do "updates" and categorize downloads as easily as on ITunes. Also, the forum sign-in is no longer recognizing my name and password - with the new site, do we need to sign up for forum privileges again separately? -- Charles

Hi Chazyouwin,
There has always been a separate signup process for the forum, so your login details shouldn’t have been affected by the upgrade to the website. We’ll work on a feature to categorize the downloads of the lessons and hopefully make it easier to download a bunch of lessons at once

Thanks Moshaya. Not a big deal, really. I've already gotten used to it.

For some unknown reason downloads from your site go into "music" categories rather than to "podcast" categories, but that really isn't a problem either. - Charles

Salaam
I've trying to find appropriate material for quite a while now and there we are......Your podcasts are exactly what I need to work on my own and finally go beyond my current intermediate level......well done your lessons are.....perfect
Thank you!