Arabic songs with English subtitles on YouTube

To all people who like Arabic dialects: There is a youtube channel called MohCoolMan which is, in fact, a great tool for learners of Arabic: It provides Arabic songs with English translation.

byGerald Drißner

September 8, 2019

2 minute read

One comment

Last updated: 1 year ago

There is a YouTube channel called MohCoolMan which turns out to be a great tool for learners of Arabic. (@Marian, thanks for the tip!)

Behind all that are two guys from Lebanon (Mohammad Wehbe and one of his best friends) who have translated hundreds of songs from all Arab countries. They also provide a lot of information about the origins of the songs and about the singers.

The audio quality is great. MohCoolMan provides the Arabic lyrics as well as the English translation and the transliteration.

youtube channel1 — *picture credit: youtube*

Mohammed and his best friend have translated songs from many Arabic countries. Note that the translation is not always a literal translation – which makes sense because it is very difficult to translate songs.

youtube amr diab — *picture credit: youtube*

Let’s take, for example, a famous song of Amr Diab (عمرو دياب) called الليلة:

About MohCoolMan’s project – what he writes about it

When we started MohCoolMan as a channel on YouTube, we never expected that one day we’d be adding content that people would actually view; hence why the name does not relate to the page’s choice of content.

However, as we discovered that the Internet, and YouTube, in particular, lacked in videos that people could use to study Arabic, we decided to translate Disney songs for that purpose, and for the purpose of allowing people to understand what’s being said. Two years later we found that Arabic, instead of growing in popularity, has gained notoriety for being associated to terrorists. That was when we decided to take on the 100 Songs Initiative, in which we determined to add 100 of the most popular and beautiful Arabic songs from all the dialects and Arab nations. We never expected to amass the number of subscribers we have today (humble as it seems), and now we want to take our content to Facebook in the hopes of reaching out to more people, and also, to have an accessible platform in which we could interact with enthusiasts of the language, and of course, allowing them to interact with one another.

As reader Marian put it: “In this way, you can also learn to distinguish the differences between the different dialects. Anyway, if you like Arabic music and culture, this channel is really a must-like!”

The channel offers hundreds of videos (also Disney videos) and sometimes dedicates a month to a certain country – for example, in March 2019 the channel featured songs from Iraq.

It is really a great tool for learning dialects and for getting a feeling for the main topics of Arabic songs.

The link to the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/MohCoolMan