🇸🇦 The best courses for learning Arabic

A genuinely free platform with lessons sorted from beginner to advanced, built around media Arabic — news clips, interviews and articles with vocabulary support and comprehension exercises — plus a matching YouTube channel. For anyone learning Arabic to read or watch the news, the register is exactly right. The interface is easier to navigate in Arabic than in English, and there is no speaking practice at all.

Foreign Service Institute, Peace Corps and DLI materials — full textbooks plus hundreds of hours of audio — are public domain and hosted here for free across dozens of languages. The depth is extraordinary and the FSI Basic courses take diplomats to professional working proficiency, which no consumer app attempts. The recordings are from the 1960s–80s, the drills are relentless, and some vocabulary is dated (Cold War era), so they suit disciplined self-studiers, not casual learners.

Mihalis Eleftheriou records real lessons with a real student and walks you through constructing the language yourself using cognates and logic — Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Swahili are covered. Completely free, no ads, no sign-up, funded by donations. The Spanish course in particular is one of the most recommended free resources anywhere; the trade-off is small vocabulary and no reading or writing practice.

A complete government-produced Moroccan Arabic curriculum — dialogues, grammar notes, vocabulary lists and accompanying audio — released free and collected here alongside other Darija materials. Written for volunteers about to live in Moroccan villages, so the vocabulary is genuinely practical. The materials date from the 2000s, the page is a plain link hub rather than a polished platform, and transliteration conventions differ from what modern courses use.

Dialogue-plus-explanation lessons with transcripts, line-by-line breakdowns and flashcards, covering absolute beginner through lower intermediate. The sheer volume makes it a decent daily listening habit, and a free account gives real access before you commit. Two caveats: the catalogue mixes varieties without always making the distinction obvious, so check whether a lesson is formal Arabic or dialect; and the marketing is relentless, with prices only reasonable during their frequent sales.

Covers 14 languages along an explicit CEFR path, and its best feature is the community exchange: you submit short writing or speaking exercises and real native speakers correct them, free of charge, in exchange for you correcting theirs. The free tier is limited to core lessons; Premium unlocks grammar, offline and the full path. A solid Babbel alternative if you specifically want writing practice with human feedback.

Mark Pentleton teaches a genuine student while you listen in, across French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, Portuguese, Japanese and Gaelic. The podcast seasons are free on any podcast app and are structured as a real curriculum rather than scattered episodes; the Academy sells premium lesson notes, video and bonus audio. Ideal commuting material for beginners through B1, and the Spanish and French series are the strongest.

A modern course platform for Moroccan Arabic — the dialect furthest from anything a Modern Standard course prepares you for — with a set of free modules before the paid tiers, taught by native speakers. Useful for anyone moving to or working in Morocco. Darija's Amazigh and French loan vocabulary means very little transfers to Middle Eastern Arabic, so choose it deliberately rather than as your default dialect.

A long-running course covering Gulf pronunciation, script, grammar, everyday vocabulary and business communication, with audio recorded for every word and sentence, aimed at expatriates working in the region. Gulf Arabic is badly underserved, so a sequenced course of any kind is worth knowing about. Some introductory lessons are free and the rest is a paid membership; the site design is dated and there is little independent review of the material.

Video lessons and a growing comprehensible-input library focused on Jordanian Levantine, available on the web and as an app, with sample material free on YouTube. It fills a specific gap: a sequenced dialect course rather than a scattered playlist. Full access is a paid subscription, the catalogue is smaller than long-established platforms, and the Jordanian focus means some vocabulary differs from Lebanese or Palestinian usage.

Two free self-paced courses — a reading course that teaches the script letter by letter, then a language course covering core grammar and vocabulary — with audio and exercises throughout. It is the best free zero-to-basics path for Modern Standard Arabic and is popular with learners whose goal is reading classical and religious texts. Paid one-to-one classes are offered on top; the free material is text-heavy and gives you almost no conversational practice.

A Saudi-published series used across the Arab world and in Islamic studies programmes, written entirely in Arabic with heavy audio support and a strong speaking and listening emphasis from the first book. Because there is no English, it forces immersion and works well with a teacher or a study group. That same choice makes it hard to start alone with no guidance, and the vocabulary skews formal and religious.

Parts One to Three carry you from post-alphabet beginner to advanced reading of literary and journalistic Arabic, and the third edition deliberately teaches formal Arabic together with Egyptian and Levantine spoken forms rather than pretending dialects do not exist. If you want the same syllabus a degree programme uses, this is it. It is widely criticised for a punishing vocabulary load, thin grammar explanations and a design that assumes a teacher — self-learners often need a supplementary grammar.

Volume zero of the Al-Kitaab programme, taking you from no Arabic at all to reading and handwriting the alphabet, with video drills for the sounds English speakers struggle with (ع، ح، ق، ط) and a companion website of exercises. Uniquely for a script book, it introduces Egyptian and Levantine pronunciation alongside formal Arabic from the start. It is a paid textbook whose online access code is tied to the purchase, and used copies often have that code already redeemed.

Each course is ~100 short bilingual dialogues with native audio: you passively absorb for months, then start an 'active wave' translating back into the target language. Books run around €30 (e-courses ~€50) across 70+ languages, and the method is a long-standing favourite among polyglots for reaching real reading fluency. Caveats: many courses are only published from French, the humour is dated, and it demands daily discipline with no gamification to carry you.

Subscription-only after a handful of free intro lessons, typically $10–15/month with big discounts on annual plans. Lessons are short, dialogue-first and explain grammar properly, which makes it a much more serious beginner course than Duolingo. It covers only 13 languages and effectively stops around B1, so it is a stepping stone rather than a destination.

Over 70 languages, each a step-by-step beginner course written by an experienced teacher, and crucially all the audio is free to download from the companion site even if you find the book secondhand. Slightly more academic and grammar-forward than Teach Yourself, which some learners prefer. Like any book series the individual titles differ in quality; the less common languages are often the only decent course in existence.

You listen to and repeat thousands of native-recorded sentences on a spaced schedule, which builds fluent output patterns without explicit grammar study. It covers 60+ languages and keeps nine minority languages (Catalan, Welsh, Taiwanese, Kurdish and others) permanently free as a preservation effort. It is expensive at roughly $20–40/month, and the repetition is monotonous — most reviewers call it effective but overpriced, so try the 7-day trial first.

A properly sequenced spoken-Egyptian curriculum (Bishweesh through Aktar) written in Arabic script with audio, taking you from survival phrases to genuinely advanced colloquial — no other dialect has anything this complete. Widely used by language schools in Cairo. Books are paid and sold per level, instructions are largely in Arabic, and like most classroom series it works far better with a teacher or tutor than alone.

Lessons build outward from real conversations with colour-coded literal translations and cultural notes, and the catalogue includes endangered and indigenous languages nobody else covers. Retail pricing starts around $10/month, but a very large number of public libraries and universities give patrons free access — check yours before paying. Content depth per language is modest, so it suits travellers and early learners more than people pushing toward B2.

You sit in on a recorded lesson with two students and build sentences aloud alongside them, with no writing, homework or memorisation; 19 languages are available. It is remarkably good at making the core grammar of Romance languages click in a few hours. Vocabulary coverage is small, the recordings are old, and the courses after Michel Thomas's death are taught by other teachers with mixed results — treat it as a fast on-ramp, not a course of study.

Thirty-minute audio lessons force you to produce sentences out loud before you see anything written, which builds unusually good accent and recall. Subscriptions run about $15–21/month (all-access covers 50+ languages), and older courses are often available through public libraries. It is slow and vocabulary-light by design, so pair it with reading — but for commute or walking time it is the best use of otherwise dead hours.

Qasid is one of the best-known immersion schools in the Arab world and runs its full sequence — formal Arabic, classical texts and Jordanian Levantine — as live small-group and private online classes with placement testing. The right choice if you need accountability and real teaching rather than self-study. It is priced like tuition, not like an app, and requires committing to a schedule across time zones.

Covers Egyptian, Levantine, Saudi, Iraqi, Sudanese, Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian with native-speaker audio and video dialogues and transcripts, which makes it the most practical single answer for someone who has picked a dialect other than Egyptian. Useful too if you are still deciding and want to hear them side by side. It is a paid membership, material is organised as a library rather than a course, and depth varies a lot between the well-served dialects and the smaller ones.

The 'Complete' books are proper structured courses with dialogues, graded exercises and downloadable audio, and the range covers languages no app touches. Quality varies noticeably by title and author, so check reviews for your specific language before buying rather than trusting the series name. Their graded readers and 'Script Hacking' alphabet guides are also worth knowing about for non-Latin scripts.