Practice Arabic and Turkish in Istanbul with Natives

In Istanbul you hear more Arabic on the street than most visitors expect. Walk around Aksaray or Fevzi Paşa Caddesi in Fatih and half the shop signs and conversations are Levantine Arabic, not Turkish - the Syrian community there is large and it's not going anywhere. A few kilometers away in Şişli and Osmanbey, the Arabic you hear is different again: Gulf tourists doing their shopping, and shopkeepers who've picked up enough Gulf Arabic to sell them a coat. Meanwhile Turks who want to learn Arabic are often aiming at a third thing entirely - Modern Standard Arabic for study or business - which has almost nothing in common with what's spoken two streets away.

Finding someone to practice with in person here is harder than it sounds. The city is cut in half by the Bosphorus, and going from Kadıköy to Beşiktaş means a ferry that takes twenty minutes if you're lucky, plus getting to and from the pier. Cross by bridge instead and you're gambling with traffic that can turn a 25-minute drive into an hour and a half with no warning. Add the five daily prayer times shifting people's evenings, and Ramadan changing the whole rhythm of the city after iftar, and a coffee meetup planned for 7pm falls apart more often than it happens.

Doing it over video removes the part that actually breaks these plans - the getting there. You don't need your exchange partner to be on the same side of the Bosphorus, free during the same traffic window, or done with work at the same time as you. You show up for your half hour of Turkish, they show up for their half hour of Arabic, and neither of you spent forty minutes on a minibus to make it happen.