The best Levantine Arabic courses

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.

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.

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.

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.