From Intermediate to Advanced Arabic Using NotebookLM

Christoph Weyer is a researcher based in Hamburg, Germany. In this guest article, he shares his experiences on how to make the leap from intermediate to advanced Arabic.

One important tool is Google’s NotebookLM, one of the most powerful and impressive AI tools available today. In this article, we will examine how you can use NotebookLM to understand Arabic videos and create vocabulary sheets and transcripts.

Christoph Weyer

After studying church music and musicology at Folkwang University Essen and Freie Universität Berlin, he served as a cantor and lecturer in church music education at the University of Church Music in Dresden from 2014 to 2019. In 2019, he became a research assistant at the Institute for Historical Musicology at the University of Hamburg, where he also pursued Islamic Sciences and completed his dissertation “Die adiastematisch neumierten Handschriften der Berlinka-Sammlung”. Since October 2023, he has been a Principal Investigator at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC), leading the project Arabic Music Theory and Music in Manuscripts of the Latin Middle Ages.

Learning Arabic with AI

Once you’ve mastered the basics of the Arabic language, learned essential vocabulary, and are able to hold basic conversations and write simple letters, the question quickly arises: What’s next? There are plenty of learning materials for “intermediate learners”, but these often come from academic contexts.

For example, one such resource is Claudia Ott’s Erste arabische Lesestücke (First Arabic Reading Pieces) which features simplified texts in German an Arabic. This is a good starting point, as you can tackle one or two sentences a day. However, this primarily trains text comprehension and less so everyday spoken language.

Until recently, it was almost impossible to jump straight into media res. Watching Al-Jazeera or Arabic TV series was just too challenging. The only solution often suggested was to spend time abroad in Arabic-speaking countries. However, this could also be exhausting since most of the language spoken there is in dialects that need to be learned first. This often meant starting over again, which could be incredibly frustrating for intermediate learners, leaving them in limbo.

Slow Down the Tempo!

The biggest challenge for intermediate learners is the speed of native speakers. While most grammatical structures can now be recognized, they are processed very slowly. To increase your listening and comprehension speed, you need an intermediate step.
Fortunately, AI can now fill this gap. For example, you can use ChatGPT as a conversation partner and instruct it to stay at a specific language level or explain unfamiliar words. You can ask ChatGPT to discuss certain topics or generate vocabulary lists. These lists can then be used to prepare for conversations with language exchange partners, where you can practice “in the wild”.

For instance, if your language partner is a car enthusiast, you can first use ChatGPT to learn the most important terms and expressions, then apply them in conversation. This way, you can slow down the pace and focus on targeted learning.

Google’s NotebookLM: Decoding YouTube Videos

Another challenge – specially when watching videos – is encountering new vocabulary that is difficult to understand due to the speaker’s speed. This is further complicated by the fact that words are typically used in inflected forms. Add to that personal endings or dialect-influenced pronunciations, and it becomes even harder.

Here, Google’s NotebookLM can be incredibly helpful. Simply provide a YouTube link to an Arabic video with the desired content as a source. First, it can generate a summary of the content, which often helps because you’ll already have an idea of the topic. But you can go further: NotebookLM can list the key vocabulary from the video. This way, you can either confirm whether you’ve understood the words correctly or review the vocabulary beforehand and then watch the video, recognizing the words as they appear. This significantly reduces frustration!

Another added benefit: If you’re watching a news video on Al-Jazeera, for example, it might include interviews with people speaking in dialects. NotebookLM can identify the dialect, recognize it as such, and even pinpoint its regional origin.

If you watch a few videos on the same topic, you’ll make significant progress. You’ll begin to understand how native speakers discuss certain topics and move beyond simplified “textbook Arabic”.

Of course, NotebookLM can also be used for reading texts. Simply upload a PDF as a source, and it can generate vocabulary lists in the same way. This makes learning much faster and helps you get back on track with your progress!

Step-by-Step: How to use NotebookLM to study Arabic

Let’s take a step-by-step look at how to use Google’s NotebookLM to work with and learn from Arabic videos.

Open NotebookLM

Google NotebookLM is an AI tool for note-taking that uses Google Gemini to help users work with their documents. It can create summaries, explanations, and answer questions based on uploaded content, like PDF files, YouTube videos, and Word documents. NotebookLM has gained attention for its ability to generate podcast discussions as well.

Copy and paste a YouTube link

I randomly selected a video on YouTube from the Arabic news channel al-Arabiya: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C42xSn7f6g

Now, the only thing you need to do is to create a new notebook, choose YouTube as a source and paste the YouTube link.

You will now see a dashboard. It shows a summary of the video.

Ask NotebookLM to create a vocabulary sheet

Now, we can ask Google NotebookLM to shows us some key vocab used in the video. You can use the chat prompt.

Getting all this in seconds, instead of taking a few minutes to watch the video, is truly impressive.

Ask NotebookLM to show phrases from the video with translation

We can ask Google NotebookLM to provide Arabic sentences along with their English translations from the video.

There are some mistakes and the spelling needs to be corrected, but it is certainly a good start. Now all you have to do is watch the video and correct the mistakes, which is easy. Writing down whole sentences, on the other hand, would be really time-consuming.

Ask NotebookLM for a full transcript with translation

You can get the full Arabic text of the video (transcript) with an English translation.

This also worked surprisingly well.