Egyptian Arabic Resources
As a learner of Arabic it was always easy to find resources for standard Arabic, but finding quality resources for colloquial varieties was not.
Egyptian Arabic is luckily one of the better resourced ones, owing maybe to its large film and music industries, its history of French and British colonialism, and its ancient monuments drawing in tourists and researchers from abroad. Still, it's harder to find resources for than abundantly-resourced western European languages like French and Spanish. For that reason, I wanted to start off my blog by making a list of resources I recommend.
Dictionaries
-One of the best dictionaries out there is the one by Hinds and Badawi, but in the modern day and age I think the best dictionaries should be available in digital form, and with more functionality.
One of the best online dictionaries for colloquial Arabic varieties is Lughatuna. It contains probably most of the entries from Hinds and Badawi, is full of useful examples, and being able to look things up quickly saved me from countless embarrassing situations during my studies in Egypt.
-I also created my own Egyptian Arabic dictionary app that I think is very useful in that is has a few extra features. It was partially inspired by reverso context. My app, Egypto Contexto, has a huge English-Masry-Fus7a dictionary and also includes a corpus of over 50,000 lines of dialogue from authentic Egyptian TV shows and movies with English translation so students can see an Egyptian Arabic word along with its equivalent in MSA and English AND its use in a real sentence. The app also has a quiz mode so you can favorite words to add them to a list to quiz yourself. You can also add your own custom dictionary entries. It's available for Android and IOS and can be used offline.
Textbooks and other learning
-I'm not sure what to recommend for beginners, but AUC Press has some great textbook series. I know there is an Egyptian version of Arrabiyyat al Nas, which I think I would recommend over Al-Kitaab (although in my undergrad we used Al-Kitaab so I can't say from experience that it's better, only that I wish my curriculum had integrated colloquial Arabic more like the other textbook appears to).
-As I started studying Masry when I already had had a few years of Fus7a and a colloquial Palestinian class, I started with textbooks that are aimed at people who already know some Fus7a. Of those, I highly recommend the Kalaam Gamiil series: it has excellent explanations of Egyptian-specific grammatical constructions, especially the complex clitic system (what do you do when you need to negate a verb that already has a direct object pronouns AND an indirect object pronoun? "I didn't give them to her" is this complex form: maddithumlahaash!) Another great one for advanced students is Om al-Donya which isn't as in-depth as Kalaam Gamiil in terms of grammar, but has better selected topics and comes with a CD for audio with example sentences of vocab and scenes acted out, and is full of relevant cultural information. I used this one at student in CASA and it definitely taught me a lot of new things even after having used Kalaam Gamiil, with which it has significant overlap.
-The American University in Cairo also has produced some other gems like Kilma Helwa: Egyptian Arabic through popular songs, a book on how to use conjunctions properly in prose, and the Arabi Liblib series: a book of colloquial descriptors, one of idioms, and one of proverbs. The proverbs may not be as practically useful, but I found the idioms and descriptors extremely useful.
-This site isn't a textbook exactly but is a great for general grammar reference and has really great vocab lists.
-I have another app where you can quiz yourself on Egyptian Arabic vocab by theme for Android (and it also lists MSA equivalents), though this one is a little older, back when I first started learning to make apps.
-Lingualism also has some excellent resources, including fun stories with full audio and essential vocab. They also have resources for Tunisian, Shami, and MSA!
Videos
-The Easy Egyptian Arabic youtube series is a great way to see natural speech.
-I also highly recommend playaling: it's a site with videos on all kinds of topics in different Arabic dialects with two-language subtitles which you can hover over to see explanations of individual words and phrases.
-Netflix has added a lot of Egyptian content these past few years, including lots of classic films and some new series. Some of the newest ones are Searching for Ola (البحث عن علا), a sort of sequel to the famous 3aiza Atgawwez (I want to get married), Paranormal (ما وراء الطبيعة), and Abla Fahita: Drama Queen. I recommend watching these on google chrome using the Language Reactor plugin so you can watch with two-language subtitles.
-If you're at the level where you feel comfortable watching shows without subtitles, many musalsalat are available on Youtube.
Music
-There are tons of great Egyptian artists (and non-Egyptian artists who sing in the Egyptian dialect!) and maybe I'll do a more in-depth post some other time, but here a few popular ones and a few of my personal favorites: Nancy Ajram (Lebanese pop star), Cairokee (underground-ish), Wegz (Alexandrian rap), Oka wi Ortega (Mahraganaat/Sha3bi), Abdel Halim Hafez (oldies), Om Kolthoum (probably the most famous of all time), Black Theama (underground, Nubian-influenced)
-There's also this great lyric translation blog that looks like it was discontinued some time ago, but still a great resource.
