Now you can learn Arabic in a 'tweet'

Want to learn Arabic but too busy to get to class? Problem solved. From next Tuesday, lessons can come to you, without interrupting your schedule, through the micro-blogging website Twitter. The Eton Institute, a Dubai-based language school, is to offer daily, condensed Arabic lessons by qualified instructors in the form of "tweets", which students can read on their computers or mobile phones.

The school has drawn up a six-month Twitter-based curriculum that will include common Arabic phrases and greetings, focusing on different themes, such as what to say in a supermarket or how to ask for a haircut or get around in a taxi. The free lessons will start with one tweet per day. "We're trying to reach people as much as possible," said Eli Abi Rached, the school's managing director. "We're trying to make it accessible. There's nothing easier than having a lesson pop up on a computer or a mobile."

The lessons will be sent in phonetic English to allow students to pick up colloquialisms as quickly as possible. The institute said it would forgo any particular dialect in favour of standard Arabic, which is more widely understood. "The idea is to teach functional Arabic that people can use on an everyday basis," Mr Abi Rached said. If the course is a success, the school may add more lessons and more complicated phrases and themes.

"We're willing to go all the way, depending how much excitement there is. Whatever it takes to get people to learn," he said. The school is planning similar courses in other popular languages, such as Spanish and Farsi. Mita Srinivasan works at a Dubai-based public relations agency and is an avid Twitter user. She said the short bursts of information would make learning Arabic easier. "I don't have time to devote a whole hour," she said. "It's nice to have a few words to learn while tweeting, which I enjoy."

Like many Twitter users, she said she spends much of her day online. Twitter lessons would be easier for her than attending a class. "Most of us who have been here long enough know the basics - 'hi,' 'how are you,' 'thank you'. You pick it up as you're interacting with people. But it would be nice to have a few more words than that." Twitter was launched in 2006 and was unblocked by UAE authorities in August last year. It allows people to post updates, or "tweets", of 140 characters or less.

The website shot to fame when it was embraced by celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, the actor Ashton Kutcher and the basketball player Shaquille O'Neal. A recent report by the social media analytical service Sysomos said more than 60 per cent of the site's users lived in the US. Although Twitter has proved popular in the West, the UAE has only about 5,000 users, according to research released last month by Spot On Public Relations.

However, that is enough to give the country the highest concentration of users in the Middle East. The Arab world has about 12,200 users, mostly professionals in the communications business, including journalism, public relations and marketing. To follow Eton's Arabic courses, you need a Twitter account, which can be obtained for free at www.twitter.com. jgerson@thenational.ae