Reddit reviews 701 Lebanese Verbs

There are several resources that I think you might find helpful, however I would advise against the Lebanese YouTuber as she only gives very basic lessons and uses allot of English.

[701 Lebanese Verbs] (https://www.amazon.com/701-Lebanese-Verbs-Maroun-Kassab/dp/0615751245)

The book is good, not great, but the verbs are very very lebanese so that may be a plus.

Also YouTube has quite a few shows in the dialect that are pretty entertaining. If you are advanced I would suggest Ma Fi Metlo, DNA, as well as just searching for anything using the terms "مسلسلات باللهجة اللبنانية"

If you just want to get familiar with the dialect go for either Beirut I Love You (The mini series not the short film) or the film West Beirut as they both have subtitles.

I was in a similar situation to you a few years back. I taught myself the language using the following book:

https://www.amazon.fr/dialecte-Libanais-larabe-litt%C3%A9ral-partie/dp/095288822X

This is the French version which can easily be bought online. There exists an English version that is easy to get your hands on in Lebanon but from abroad I am not sure it is easy to find.

I also found the following book incredibly helpful:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/701-Lebanese-Verbs-Maroun-Kassab/dp/0615751245

Honestly, every Lebanese worth his/her weight in salt should own a copy of that book. It's the closest thing I can find to a Lebanese dictionary (obviously just for verbs).

After learning the language, I started watching some Lebanese TV programs. Being of a younger generation, I can't stand soaps and Lebanese soaps are some of the worst soaps out there. I eventually stumbled on 'Mafi Metlo'. It's a sketch comedy show which is honestly quite funny (at least, the earlier seasons are). The accent they usually speak with is a bog-standard Beiruti one which is the most common you would hear in the media (and one of the easier ones for a person who did not grow up in the Arab world to understand I find). The advantage of watching a show like Mafi Metlo (there are other sketch comedies like 'Ktir Salbeh Show' but I'm not a huge fan of that one) is that you also get a heavy dose of Lebanese culture, politics and (more relevantly to language) idioms and common phrases that you wouldn't pick up in a textbook. This greatly increases your capacity to speak Lebanese since the language is full of (usually unwritten although I do now recall that my grandfather has a book on Lebanese proverbs) such things.

When it comes to Arabic script, Lebanese is hardly ever written (at least by the younger generations) in that script. Most young people will use Latin letters and the Lebanese form of the 'chat arabic alphabet' (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet ). Note that there is some internal variation in the country as to how certain letters are transliterated. For example, Christians and French educated people tend to use 'ch' to transliterate ش whereas it is usually the case that Non-Christian and English/Arabic educated people will default to 'sh' (forgive me for the sectarianism but it's something valid to be pointed out).

Levantine Arabic (which Lebanese is a form of; to be specific, it is Western Levantine) is surprisingly very formulaic (or perhaps unsurprisingly since it is heavily [and most uniformly] influenced by Aramaic). The more you get used to it, the more you realise the underlying (and sadly not well-exposed pedagogically I find) patterns. To a newish speaker the various forms of Levantine Arabic can sound very different (even within a country: the Tripoli accent is quite different to the Beiruti accent; similarly, Eastern Syrian sounds more like Iraqi than it does Damascene [which is pretty much grouped in Western Levantine afaik]). However, the more exposure you have, the more you realise that these languages all sound very much the same where the differences are mostly due to pronounciation rather than grammatical structure.