Free Arabic learning resources
8 free resources, checked and categorised.
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The first decision in Arabic matters more than any resource choice: Modern Standard Arabic or a spoken dialect. MSA is the language of news, books and formal writing, and almost nobody speaks it at home. A dialect — Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf — is what conversation actually happens in. Most people want both eventually; starting with both at once is what stalls learners.
The script is less trouble than it looks and takes a couple of weeks. Short vowels are usually unwritten, which means reading fluency depends on already knowing the word — so vocabulary and reading grow together rather than one enabling the other.
Root-and-pattern morphology is Arabic's great efficiency: once you recognise a three-letter root, whole families of related words open up at once. It is worth learning that system explicitly and early, because it turns vocabulary from memorisation into pattern recognition.
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Same as above, but it's English-Arabic this time.
An Arabic-English dictionary from the XIX century, in case you'd like to read the Koran or classic Arabic literature.
A German-many languages dictionary.
The online version of the Russian-Arabic dictionary.
Learn it there, practise it here
Free resources are great for input — reading, listening, explanations. They are weaker at the two things that actually move you forward: speaking Arabic out loud, and remembering what you met once. That is what OwnSlides is for.
Say it out loud
Talk to an AI tutor that answers back, or join a live room with other learners and native speakers.
Practise what you read
Turn a grammar point or article into exercises, so it moves from recognised to usable.
Keep the words
Save new words to My Words and let spaced repetition bring them back before you forget them.
This directory began from a community-built list of free language resources — a year of collecting and checking by Joanna (u/chlebka) and dozens of contributors who suggested links, shared freely. See the original list. We have since expanded, re-checked and re-categorised it, and we keep the per-resource credits where the original list recorded them.