Arabic learning guides and word lists
Plans, word lists and prompts for learning Arabic, published in 13 languages.
- 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. Here is the family, every member tappable.
- 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.