🇸🇦 Best Arabic websites for beginners

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.

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.

A collaborative, Creative Commons-licensed corpus you can search for real usage of a word or download in bulk to build your own decks. It is the raw material behind Clozemaster and countless Anki decks rather than a study tool in itself. Sentences are contributed by volunteers, so quality and naturalness vary — prefer sentences from native contributors and cross-check anything surprising.

Over 100 language editions; the English edition alone has millions of entries covering hundreds of languages, with IPA, declension and conjugation tables, etymologies and usage notes that commercial apps usually paywall. The etymology sections are quietly one of the best vocabulary-retention tools available. Being crowd-sourced, coverage is uneven and rare entries can be wrong — cross-check anything unusual against a native-language dictionary.

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.

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.

A dedicated Egyptian Colloquial dictionary that gives you conjugated verb forms, plurals and transliteration rather than making you guess how a Modern Standard entry gets pronounced in Cairo. Free browsing covers most needs; an account and paid tier unlock extras like saved lists. The database is community-built so quality varies between entries, the interface has not changed in years, and the site is intermittently unreachable — retry rather than assuming it is gone.

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.

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.

A detailed staged roadmap for acquiring a language through massive comprehensible input — what to do at each stage, when to start output, how to mine sentences — with a free tracker, starter courses and an active Discord. The roadmap and community are free; vocabulary decks, advanced courses and coaching are paid. It is opinionated to the point of dogma about avoiding early output and translation, so take the framework and ignore the purity rules if they do not fit your goals.

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.