Our dear non-Arabic speakers, If you find it difficult to pronounce ‘3aen’ or ‘GHaen’ Muhammad Barazy will definitely help you. Barazy is an ambitious young man from Syria, Hama. What he does exactly?! His love for languages inspired him to launch a YouTube channel, AraVid, to teach foreigners Arabic.
Muhammad told Barakabits the story behind AraVid, He stated:
“I consider AraVid as a resemblance of the strong will of living and the hope that we -Syrians- have, because I -as a Syrian- faced a lot of sad calamities, tragic incidents, and lost some of my goals, academic achievements, many friends as well. At that moment, I needed something to live for so I can believe again that there is something in this life worth living for.”
So he tried to rearrange his life and get up again. He made a new list of goals and did so many things in order to follow his dream.
Describing the difficulties that faced him, Mohammed said that:
My love to learn languages (English primarily), and my desire to meet new cultures increased in that period. However, because of the high prices of language courses here and not having enough money on the other hand, I tried to think out of the box to practice English and improve my skills in it. So I started a self-study courses, and started using language communication apps, like (English radio, hello pal, Hello talk ,etc.) to speak with natives. And yes, I touched the difference.
Most of those who practiced English with Muhammad were Arabic learners, and through the frequent contact with them, he noticed that they have problems in pronouncing some Arabic letters, words, as well as grammatical mistakes too. So, he decided to help them with his modest English by establishing a YouTube channel to help not only them, but also all Arabic learners all over the world as much as he can.
It took him about 2 months to think deeply about this, and to read some language references about teaching Arabic for foreigners. In 29 May 2017, he initiated his channel Arabic with Barazy, AraVid to publish the first video in 9 June with self-efforts in everything (i.e. recording, writing the scenario, montage, etc.).
Increasing views on YouTube is a whole other mission. Muhammad faced this problem and after publishing 2 or 3 videos he was shocked with how low the interaction was, and he felt as if he made a reckless dissension by establishing this channel and all the efforts was in vain. So he deactivated it and wanted to quit everything.
He didn’t give up as he determined after a month of thinking to restart everything to benefit the learners even if they were few. He determined also to increase the advertisement effort on social media. He established a Facebook page, twitter account, joined a lot of Arabic learning groups on Facebook to share his videos there, and uploaded new videos with diverse subjects.
“And I touched the difference well, because more audience saw the videos by this way. Alhamdulillah all the reviews and feedback was positive. Also a lot of Arabic learners (especially English and Spanish natives) told me then that they took the advantages from my videos more than any other videos …especially the pronunciation matter, and they also praised my American accent.”
All these positive reviews gave him the power to complete what he has started, and encouraged him to ask the help from famous non-Arabic pages so he could reach more Arabic learners and more audience. Although he didn’t receive any answer from them most of the time, that didn’t stop him from following his goals.
The future of the project is to let more Arabic teachers/language lovers teach Arabic under the shelter of AraVid. However, so far, he wants to keep it as a personal project and work for it alone although he spends a lot of time on the preparation of each video.
His dream is to attend linguistic and cultural exchange courses and conferences to learn more about others cultures and tell them about his. He also wants to improve his English more and more as well as his Spanish which he has just started to learn.
Muhammad is definitely doing a great job through his channel. Don’t miss any of his episodes on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/aravidofficial and the latest updates on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/aravidofficial
