The best AI apps to practice speaking Arabic

What you need to practice speaking Arabic

Arabic takes work. In our ranking of 67 languages, Modern Standard Arabic is the 16th hardest for English speakers, at 6,480 effort points. That’s more than twice what Spanish takes (2,941), a bit more than Russian (6,067), and right next to Turkish (6,521).

And that’s for one kind of Arabic. What makes it hard isn’t only the script or the sounds. It’s that the Arabic on the news and the Arabic people speak at home aren’t quite the same language.

• Which Arabic?Modern Standard Arabic, or MSA, is what you read, and hear on the news. It’s understood across the Arab world. At home, people speak their own Arabic: Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf, Maghrebi. “Now” is الآن (al-ān) in MSA, دلوقتي (dilwaʾti) in Cairo, هلّق (hallaʾ) in the Levant and الحين (al-ḥīn) in the Gulf. So decide early what you want to understand, and who you want to talk to.
• A script without short vowels28 letters, written right to left, and most letters change shape with their place in the word. Short vowels usually aren’t written: كتب can be kataba, he wrote, or kutub, books. You read it from the words around it. Until then, you want the pronunciation above each word.
• Sounds English doesn’t haveThe throaty ع (ʿayn), a breathy ح next to a plain ه, and a ق said deep in the throat. Say قلب (qalb), heart, with a k, and you’ve said كلب (kalb), dog. The quickest fix: say your sentence, then hear a native speaker say the same one.
• Gender, everywhereVerbs, adjectives and even “you” change with who you talk to. How are you? is kayfa ḥāluka to a man and kayfa ḥāluki to a woman. And plurals of things take a feminine singular adjective: الشوارع مزدحمة, the streets are crowded. Knowing the rule is one thing. Getting it right while you talk takes practice.
• Lots of Arabic you understandSpeaking activates the words you have. New words come from input: videos, podcasts and texts where you already understand most of it.
• Lots of speaking timeA language this hard takes hours of talking. A few minutes a day won’t get you there.

A complete fluency system, not just a speaking app

Our speaking practice is the heart of Teacher AI. But speaking alone won’t make you fluent, and neither will input alone. You need both, and you need to see it working. With Arabic that matters even more: apart from a few words like قهوة (qahwa), coffee, almost every word is new to you, so you need to meet each one many times.

So Teacher AI is a complete fluency system. Input grows your Arabic. Speaking activates it. And we track every word along the way, to get you to real fluency as fast as we can.

1. Step 1Input grows your vocabularyWatch Arabic YouTube videos and podcasts, and read stories written at your level, with the transliteration above every word. You always see how much you already understand, and every word you tap becomes a flashcard. How Watch and Read work.
2. Step 2Speaking activates itRecognizing a word isn’t the same as saying it, with the right ending for a man or a woman and the sounds in the right place. Talking with your teacher, for as long as you like, is how words move from “I know that one” to “I just said it”. Every mistake gets fixed, with a Why?.
3. Step 3We track every wordYour passive words are the ones you understand when you read or hear them. Your active words are the ones you’ve used yourself. You see both grow, how your time splits between input and output, and how many words to your next level.

Brand new to Arabic? Start somewhere else first. Teacher AI works best from about A2, once you can handle simple everyday sentences. Before that, you just don’t have enough words yet for open conversation. So learn the alphabet and the basics with Duolingo, which teaches Modern Standard Arabic for free, or with Pimsleur, which has MSA, Egyptian and Eastern Arabic. Then come back when you want to talk.

What it looks like in Arabic

Here’s what a moment of practice looks like. You answer, your teacher replies with the pronunciation above every word, and if you made a mistake, your sentence gets fixed right there.

A card for every word you tap

Tap any word, in a conversation, a video or a story, and you get its card: what it means, how to say it, what kind of word it is, and an example with a translation. Tap play to hear it.

An illustration of three word cards, rebuilt for this page. On the real card, the wording depends on the word. Below: real screenshots of the web app.

Meet your Arabic teachers

Three teachers: Layla from Cairo, Omar from Amman and Sara from Jeddah. They talk the way people talk at home: when we tried them, Layla answered in Egyptian Arabic and Omar in Jordanian Arabic. Write in standard Arabic, and your sentence is corrected in standard Arabic. Pick the teacher whose Arabic you want to hear.

• 
  Layla Mansour

  Cairo · Egyptian
• 
  Omar Haddad

  Amman · Jordanian
• 
  Sara Al-Fayed

  Jeddah · Saudi

Input: Arabic to watch and read, at your level

Here’s the input side up close. New words come from lots of Arabic you hear and read, where you already understand most of it.

Watch and Read are on the web app for now, both with the transliteration above every word. Words you read along with, without tapping, count toward your passive words. Every word you tap lands in your flashcards. And when you’re done, you talk about it with your teacher.

• Any YouTube videoPaste a link to an Arabic YouTube video, or an Apple Podcasts episode. MSA or Egyptian, the news or a Cairo vlog: you pick. We turn it into a page you read along with, new words in yellow. No subtitles? On a paid plan we transcribe it for you, within a monthly allowance.
• Stories written for youRead writes Arabic texts at your level, from A1 to Native, about anything you like, and suggests ideas from what you talk about with your teacher.
• How much you know, before you startTeacher AI keeps a list of every Arabic word you’ve met: the ones you use when you talk, the ones you read or hear, the ones you tap. It checks every word of a video or text against that list and shows you the share you already know.
• The 80% rulePick videos and texts where you know 80% or more of the words. Then your brain fills in the rest from context. Under 70% is too much for now. 90% and up is easy and fun.
• Then talk about itOne tap on Talk about this starts a conversation about what you just watched or read. Retelling it is how new words become words you can say.

Teacher AI or Duolingo?

Lots of people start Arabic on Duolingo: 6.54 million learners, it says. Good! So here’s how the two compare for speaking, with every Duolingo fact from Duolingo’s own pages.

The apps side by side

The apps, one by one

Where another app might suit you better

Head-to-head comparisons

Teacher AI vs Langua · Teacher AI vs Praktika · Teacher AI vs Talkpal · Teacher AI vs Duolingo. All comparisons.

Other languages

SpanishSpain and Latin AmericaFrenchFrance, Belgium and SwitzerlandMandarin ChineseSimplified or Traditional, with pinyinCantoneseHong Kong, with JyutpingThaiWith spaces between words, and Paiboon+ or IPAJapaneseWith furigana or romaji, and a kanji countDutchThe Netherlands and Flanders, with Flemish voicesBrazilian PortugueseWith Brazilian teachers and well-known polyglotsItalianWith Italian teachers from Podcast Italiano and Vaporetto ItalianoGermanWith German and Austrian teachers, from Lingster Academy to Herr AntrimEuropean PortugueseWith teachers from Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra and Faro, and Portuguese With LeoEnglishWith American and British teachers, from Espresso English to English Like A NativeKoreanWith teachers from Seoul and Busan, and every dropped 요 fixedRussianWith the stress marked above every wordTurkishWith Can from Turkishle, and every ending fixed as you talkPolishWith teachers from Warsaw, and every case ending fixedSwedishPitch accent, en or ett, and nobody switching to EnglishIndonesianWith teachers from Bali and Bandung, for the Indonesian people actually speakHindiWith teachers from Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai, and every missing ने fixedRomanianWith teachers from Bucharest and Transylvania, and every ending explainedCatalanFor when Barcelona keeps answering you in SpanishVietnameseWith teachers from Hanoi and Sapa, and every tone, classifier and pronoun fixedUkrainianWith two teachers from Lviv, and every case fixed as you talkGreekWith teachers from Crete and Thessaloniki, and every gender and ending explainedHebrewFor Hebrew without the vowels, with two teachers from Tel AvivCzechWith Klara and Lukáš from Brno, and a Why? on every case ending