About Us
Built by a teacher and a student
who refused to give up.
Speaking Lebanese exists because of a thirty-year longing, a friendship, and a decision to build something the world was missing.
Co-Founder & Course Designer
Credentials
DAEFLE (French)
DELE (Spanish) · MBA
Co-Founder & Course Designer
Nidale Bachir
🇱🇧 Beirut
Nidale Bachir is the architect of everything you'll learn on this platform. A Beirut native, formally credentialed language teacher, and curriculum designer with more than 25 years of experience — she is the reason Speaking Lebanese is structured the way it is, recorded the way it is, and works the way it does.
She holds the DAEFLE qualification in French-language teaching, the DELE diploma in Spanish, and an MBA from the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik (USEK). Over more than two decades she taught professionals, corporate teams, adult beginners, and children — earning a 4.9/5 average rating across all of them.
What she built at Speaking Lebanese is the course she always wished she could give her students: a complete, CEFR-aligned pathway — six levels, 72 lessons, every dialogue, every recording — designed from scratch for the Lebanese dialect, not adapted from anything else. She leads Speaking Lebanese's team of native Beirut instructors. Every lesson on this platform passes through her.
"Lebanese is not a foreign language — it is a living one. And living languages are meant to be spoken, not just studied."— Nidale Bachir, Co-Founder & Course Designer
Co-Founder
Co-Founder
Justine Assal MBE
Orlando, Florida
Justine is British-American, and has been married into a Lebanese family for over thirty years. For most of that time, Lebanese was the language happening around her — at Sunday lunches, in phone calls between relatives, in the shorthand of a family she loved but couldn't quite reach. Every Arabic course she tried taught a formal written language no one at her family's table actually spoke.
Then she met Nidale.
Nidale started by teaching Justine French. She was so good that when Justine finally decided to learn Lebanese — at 52, with almost no Arabic to build on — there was only one teacher she trusted to get her there. Lesson by lesson, Nidale's method did what years of apps and courses never could. Justine went from a handful of words to understanding her family, joining conversations she'd sat outside of for three decades, and falling completely in love with the language.
Somewhere along the way, her teacher became one of her closest friends. And they both saw the same thing: what Nidale had built for one student was what millions of diaspora families had been waiting for. So they built it — together.
Justine's job at Speaking Lebanese is to make sure the platform works for learners exactly like her: adult beginners, often convinced they've left it too late. She is living proof that Nidale's method works. If she can do it, you can too.
"I started learning Lebanese at 52. If it works for me, it works for anyone."— Justine Assal MBE, Co-Founder
Our Mission
To keep the Lebanese dialect — and the culture it carries — alive.
Millions of Lebanese families are scattered across the diaspora. In a generation or two, the language their grandparents spoke becomes the language their grandchildren can't. We built Speaking Lebanese to change that — one family at a time.
Lebanese is not disappearing because people don't want it. It's disappearing because no one built a proper way to teach it. We did.
Start Your Free Trial →
hello@speakinglebanese.com
