The best Modern Standard Arabic websites

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.

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.

Several hundred videos organised by level with input tracking, covering both Levantine and formal Arabic, plus crosstalk sessions with the creator (the first one free) for speaking practice. The clear level progression makes it one of the few input resources you can follow systematically rather than dipping into. A portion is free and the rest needs a subscription; Levantine and MSA only, so Egyptian or Gulf learners should look elsewhere.

Over a thousand clips — TV, music, interviews, cartoons — each with tappable Arabic and English captions, an audio dictionary and vocabulary practice, filterable by Levantine, Egyptian, Gulf, Maghrebi, MSA or Educated Spoken Arabic. It is the cleanest way to train your ear on how a specific dialect actually sounds instead of textbook recordings. There is a free tier and trial, but the useful volume needs a subscription, and there is an alphabet course but no full grammar syllabus.

The lookup most Arabic speakers and advanced learners actually use: it pulls together Lisan al-Arab and other classical dictionaries alongside modern bilingual entries, with roots, conjugations and idioms. Monolingual definitions make it the natural step up when English glosses stop being precise enough. The site is ad-heavy, the interface is cluttered, and it covers formal Arabic only — dialect words will not be there.

Search a word and see how it is used in Classical Arabic and across Egyptian, Levantine, North African, Gulf, Iraqi, Sudanese and Yemeni, with roots, plurals, pronunciation notes and example sentences — something no other free resource comes close to. Essential once you start reading or listening to real dialect material. The web dictionaries are free (a paid Lughatuna app adds offline access), and coverage is much thicker for Egyptian and Levantine than for the others.

One learner's long-maintained notes covering pronouns, verb conjugation, negation, colloquial expressions and proverbs, giving Cairene Egyptian forms next to formal Arabic with transliteration throughout. For a dialect with almost no free structured grammar available, it remains the reference people link to first. The site is old-fashioned and no longer actively updated, and the transliteration-heavy presentation means you should already be comfortable with the script.

An open educational project offering short thematic units around authentic Arab cultural material, each with video or audio, vocabulary support and activities, tagged by level so beginners get something they can actually use. It answers the 'why does my textbook have no culture in it' complaint directly. Content spans several dialects and MSA, module count is modest, and it supplements a course rather than replacing one.