The Best Apps to Learn Arabic, and the Decision They Skip

FE By Fawnio Editorial Team, Family safety and learning-tech reviewers at Fawnio.
Company documentation review · Updated July 24, 2026

Why Arabic is a different shopping trip

With Spanish or French, almost every app can teach you, so the choice is about style. Arabic narrows the field, and it does so in a way most comparison articles never mention.

First, there is no single "Arabic" to learn. Modern Standard Arabic is the shared formal language, used in writing, news and official settings across the Arab world, and it is what nearly every app teaches. But it is no one's everyday spoken language. A person in Cairo, Beirut or Casablanca grows up speaking Egyptian, Levantine or Maghrebi Arabic, and those dialects differ enough that the wrong one leaves you understood on paper but lost in a conversation. This split, known as diglossia, means deciding your goal first: reading and formal use point to MSA, talking with people points to a specific dialect.

Second, the script is a real but bounded hurdle. Arabic is written right to left, each letter changes shape depending on where it sits in a word, and short vowels are usually left out, so a reader supplies them from knowledge. It is an alphabet, not thousands of characters, so it is learnable in a matter of weeks rather than years, and Duolingo teaches it. The trap is leaning on transliteration, Arabic written in Roman letters, which feels fast and then leaves you unable to read anything real.

Third, half the usual apps opt out. Two of the biggest names in language learning do not offer Arabic at all, and plenty of comparison articles list them anyway. Getting that straight is the first money-saver on this page.

The sequence that works for Arabic: learn the alphabet and MSA free, decide which dialect you actually need, and add a native teacher of that dialect early, because the dialect and the pronunciation are exactly what an app cannot give you. Everything below is sorted into that order rather than by which company we can earn from.

Duolingo, the free way into the alphabet and MSA

Duolingo is the right first step because reading the script and getting a free daily habit is the earliest layer, and a free app is the right tool for it. Duolingo's Arabic course teaches Modern Standard Arabic and begins with the alphabet, so you learn to recognise and write the letters and their sounds, along with grammar and vocabulary. Everyone can use its courses for free, with ads for free users and paid tiers that add an ad-free experience and AI features.

Where it stops, honestly: it teaches MSA, not a spoken dialect, so it will not prepare you to chat with someone in a particular country, and it cannot hear you and correct your pronunciation, which matters more in Arabic than in most languages because several sounds have no English equivalent. Use it for the alphabet and MSA, then add a teacher for a dialect and for speaking. We do not publish a Super or Max price here; prices vary by region and channel, so check the number shown in your own app. There is no commercial relationship between Fawnio and Duolingo, and no link to it.

italki, the way to learn a dialect and actually speak

A marketplace where you book one-to-one video lessons with individual Arabic teachers who set their own prices, with no subscription and no schedule imposed on you. italki lists native Arabic teachers, more than 400 of them, and, crucially for this language, lets you choose by dialect: it has dedicated listings for Modern Standard, Egyptian and Levantine Arabic among others, alongside categories for beginners, business Arabic and test preparation. Teachers split into professional teachers, who upload documents showing training and experience, and community tutors, who provide conversation practice. Its published price bands are 10 to 120 dollars per lesson for professional teachers and 5 to 120 dollars for community tutors.

For Arabic this is the highest-value step on the page, because the two things an app cannot do, teach you a living spoken dialect and correct the sounds that do not exist in English, are exactly what a native teacher does, and you can pick a teacher who speaks the dialect you need. italki's own estimate is that Arabic takes about 2,200 hours of classes, roughly a year and a half of steady study, so the earlier a teacher is shaping your pronunciation and dialect, the less of that time is spent building habits you later have to unlearn.

The trade-off is the money mechanic, and we say it on every italki page: you buy italki Credits rather than lessons, the payment terms state that no refunds are given for credits purchased, credits expire after twelve months of account inactivity, and lesson packages must be used within six months. Top up for the lessons you have scheduled. There is a real protection worth knowing: the satisfaction guarantee covers trial lessons, twice, claimed within 48 hours.

Our italki review covers the tiers and the guarantee in detail, how much italki costs turns the ranges into monthly budgets, and italki vs Preply compares it with the other big tutor marketplace.

Browse Arabic teachers by dialect on italki

Mondly, if English is not your first language

A self-study app that teaches Arabic and whose genuine differentiator is that it teaches from your own native language rather than routing every lesson through English. If your household speaks Turkish, French, Spanish or Urdu, that removes a translation step that quietly slows Arabic down. Mondly's own Arabic pages describe short daily lessons built around common phrases, native-speaker audio, and conversation practice. The free tier covers daily lessons; Premium adds conversation practice, pronunciation lessons, grammar guides and kids content.

Two honest limits. The conversation feature is scripted practice rather than an open-ended tutor, so treat it as speaking drills, not a substitute for a person, and it will not make you fluent on its own. And the refund position is regional: Mondly's terms state that amounts are non-refundable unless stated otherwise and grant a 14-day cooling-off right only to subscribers in the UK and EU. On the US App Store the listing showed a 4.7 out of 5 rating while Trustpilot showed 2.6 out of 5, with the low scores driven by billing rather than teaching. Our Mondly review works through the free-versus-Premium split, the current prices and the refund terms.

See what Mondly Premium includes

The two that do not teach Arabic

This matters enough to state on its own, because both come up constantly and both are dead ends for Arabic.

• Babbel teaches around a dozen languages, almost all European, and Arabic, which uses its own script, is not one of them. Babbel is a well-regarded structured course for European languages; it is simply not an Arabic product.
• Lingoda, the live-class school we cover elsewhere, teaches six languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Business English. It has no Arabic classes. For a scheduled-class format in Arabic you would need a different provider; on this page the live-teacher role goes to italki instead.

Neither is a criticism of the product. It is a warning about comparison articles that list them for Arabic without checking. We name both only as benchmarks and link to neither.

The options side by side

If the learner is a child

The same sequence holds with one addition: an adult stays in the loop. italki states that most of its users are adults, asks parents to create and manage the account and to communicate with teachers themselves, warns that not all teachers are prepared to teach kids and points to its Kids category filter, and tells parents to supervise lessons. Mondly includes kids content in Premium and, because it teaches from your own language, suits a household where Arabic is a heritage language spoken by grandparents but not fluently by the child. For a child with family ties to a particular country, choosing that family's dialect for the teacher step makes the learning immediately useful.

What we would do

Spend nothing for the first stretch and learn the alphabet and some Modern Standard Arabic on a free tier until you can read the script without effort. Then decide which dialect you actually need, based on where and with whom you want to speak, and book two or three trial lessons with native teachers of that dialect, keeping the one worth meeting again, because the dialect and the pronunciation are where Arabic actually gets hard and only a person delivers them. And do not spend an afternoon trying to make Babbel or Lingoda teach you Arabic, because neither one does. The full comparison of the teaching shapes, and the credit and renewal mechanics behind each, is on our language learning hub. Curious how another non-Latin language compares? Our best apps to learn Chinese trades the dialect problem for tones, and our best apps to learn Korean has an easy alphabet and hard grammar.

Frequently asked questions

How we reach these verdicts, and the sources behind them, is on our methodology page. italki's price bands, credit rules, the "more than 400 Arabic tutors" figure, the dialect and test-preparation categories, and the class-hours estimate were read from italki's own pages and verified July 24, 2026; Duolingo's Arabic course teaches Modern Standard Arabic and the alphabet per Duolingo's own course description; Mondly's Arabic lessons, free and Premium contents and refund terms are from Mondly's own pages. That Babbel and Lingoda do not offer Arabic was confirmed against their own course listings. We publish no price for Duolingo because it did not return a public figure we verified, and no Mondly price here because it belongs with the current figures in our review. App store and Trustpilot ratings are attributed to their platforms. We earn a commission if you sign up to italki or Mondly through our links; Duolingo, Babbel and Lingoda are named for comparison only and are not linked.