Arabic learning guides and word lists
Plans, word lists and prompts for learning Arabic, published in 17 languages.
- Arabic numbers 1 to 100: the digits, the words, and how they are built (): Both sets of Arabic digits, the number words from zero to a thousand with vowel marks and pronunciation, and the one counting rule that surprises every learner.
- Harakat: the small marks that tell you how an Arabic word sounds (): Fatha, kasra, damma, sukun, shadda and the three tanwin on one letter, with real words, the two extra marks beginners ask about, and where print drops them all.
- 24 Arabic proverbs, fully vowelled, with what they say and what they mean (): Twelve proverbs worked through word by word and twelve more in a table, each with its literal sense and its meaning, and one line read slowly from start to finish.
- Your first 100 Arabic words, in ten themes (): Question words, family, the days of the week, colours, food, home, the body, places, ten verbs and ten adjectives, with the patterns that make them easier to keep.
- Where Arabic words run together: the joining alif, sun and moon letters, and ة (): A joining alif is said only when you start speaking. Before a sun letter, the ل of ال is silent and the letter is said double. Before an added ending, ة becomes ت.
- Three kinds of word: how to tell an Arabic noun, verb and particle apart (): Every Arabic word is a noun, a verb or a particle. A noun can take “the”, a present-tense verb starts with one of four letters, and a particle is a small linking word that never takes “the”.
- Arabic graded readers for adults: what exists at each level, and how to pick yours (): Adult learners of Arabic have few graded readers and no shared scale. What a levelled text controls, what exists in print and online, and one opening line from each of seven levels to find where you stand.
- Immersive Arabic learning at home: a comprehensible-input setup for fusha (): Immersion works through Arabic you can understand, not through hours of noise. Which sources are fusha and which are dialect, why a transcript matters, and a week of input for each level.
- Arabic–English dictionary apps for learners: which show the root, and how to look a word up (): An Arabic lookup has three hidden steps: remove what is attached, find the root, choose among words spelled alike. What each kind of dictionary does for you, with eight words that hide their root.
- What is iʿrāb? Arabic grammar for readers, with one sentence analysed word by word (): Arabic grammar is two sciences: ṣarf builds the word, naḥw places it in the sentence, and iʿrāb is the ending that shows the placement. One six-word sentence carries all three noun cases.
- LingQ for Arabic and Fasaha: the same method, built for different learners (): Both apps teach through reading and listening with lookup and review. LingQ is one system for more than 50 languages with import at its centre; Fasaha is built for Arabic alone, with roots, patterns and graded fusha.
- You can read the letters. How to build Arabic vocabulary after the alphabet (): Sounding out Arabic is not the same as understanding a page. How many words you need, which six layers to learn first, and whether Anki decks or cards made from your own reading serve you better.
- The Arabic alphabet: 28 letters, four shapes each, and your first words (): A table of all 28 letters in their four positions, the dot families that make them easier than they look, and nine first words in the order Fasaha’s Reading Key teaches them.
- Quranic Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic or a dialect: which Arabic to learn first (): Quranic Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic are two stages of one written language, fuṣḥā; a dialect is what people speak at home. How they differ, and where to start for your goal.
- Arabic words hidden in Italian and Portuguese, grouped by root (): Zucchero, açúcar, magazzino and armazém sorted into Arabic root families, with the article al- that Portuguese kept and the meanings that drifted on the way.
- Arabic words hidden in Indonesian, Malay and Urdu, grouped by root (): Kitab, ilmu and کتاب sorted into Arabic root families, with the false friends that catch Indonesian, Malay and Urdu speakers when they start reading Arabic.
- Three Arabic sentences read without vowels, step by step (): Three unvowelled Arabic sentences decoded word by word, from root and pattern to case ending, plus one spelling that is three different words.
- How to learn Arabic from zero: an honest first-month plan (): A week-by-week first month of Arabic for self-taught beginners: daily minutes, what to do, and how to tell that it worked.
- Jawi and Arabic letters: what a Jawi reader already knows, and what to relearn (): The six letters Jawi adds, what transfers to Arabic, and nine sound pairs where one letter changes the meaning of an Arabic word.
- 4,000 in Spanish, 400 in French, 100 in German: The Three Distinct Layers of Arabic Across Western Europe (): Western European languages absorbed Arabic across three distinct geopolitical strata: 800 years of agrarian and domestic life in Spain, maritime trade and urban argot in French, and scholarly science in German.
- French Has the غ, German Has the خ, Spanish Has the ر: The Continental European Shortcut to Arabic (): English lacks uvular fricatives and case inflections, making Arabic feel alien. French, German, and Spanish already possess the exact sounds, cases, and word orders built into their vocal and grammatical wiring.
- Al-Fatiha word by word: 29 words, 18 roots, and a tenth of the Qurʼan (): The seven verses said in every daily prayer, word by word: meaning, root and pattern for all 29 words, and a count from the Quranic Arabic Corpus showing how far those 18 roots reach across the Qurʼan.
- Should you look up every Arabic word? What the research says (): The usual advice is to guess from context and keep reading. In one study, guesses were fully right a quarter of the time. What the numbers mean for Arabic, and a two-pass routine that decides which words to look up.
- Duolingo teaches Arabic from English only. Here is what that means if English is not your first language. (): If English is your first language, Duolingo has an Arabic course for you. If English is your second language, or the learner you are helping speaks Turkish, Uzbek, Spanish or Russian, it does not. Here is how to check that on Duolingo's own list, and seven questions that sort the apps that do work.
- ك·ت·ب: one root, twelve words (): If you learned كِتَاب as a flashcard, you learned one word. If you learned it as ك·ت·ب plus a pattern, you learned a family.
- There is no IELTS for Arabic. Here is what there is instead (): English proficiency testing converged: IELTS, TOEFL and Cambridge measure the same construct and are read interchangeably anywhere. Arabic never converged. What exists instead is about a dozen serious instruments built for incompatible purposes — and no two of them are substitutes for one another.
- You already speak about twenty words of Arabic (): English borrowed these words from people, not from a classroom, so almost everyone who says them has never seen one written. Here is what each one literally says, and the single distinction that clears up most of the confusion.
- Arabic writes the consonants and trusts you with the rest (): You learned twenty-eight letters, opened a real page, and could not read it. That is not a gap in the alphabet you were taught. It is that ordinary Arabic writes almost none of its vowels, and nobody told you what fluent readers use instead.
- Understanding the Qurʼan in Arabic is a reading problem, not a memory problem (): Most people who read the Qurʼan every day cannot read Arabic, and that is the global norm rather than a personal failure. Here is what closing that gap actually costs, in the order the work has to be done.
- The best Arabic app depends on a question nobody asks you first (): Every ranking disagrees because each is answering a different question. Arabic is two distinct registers in one language, and the app built for reading classical texts is useless for chatting in a Cairo cafe.
- A 7-day Arabic shadowing plan for people who already listen to Arabic podcasts (): You can follow an Arabic podcast and still freeze when you open your mouth. Here is a seven-day shadowing plan built on a single 40-second clip.
- 18 Arabic words Turkish and Uzbek speakers already know — and 5 that will betray you (): Kitap, kalem, vakit, akıl. The Arabic layer in Turkish and Uzbek hands you a vocabulary you never studied — but five words have drifted badly.
- The 20 Qurʼanic words to learn first: a list for readers who memorised without understanding (): Twenty of the most frequent words in the Qurʼan, with verified occurrence counts, for readers who memorised the text as children and never learned what it says.