Tell us where you are
A three-minute placement quiz puts you on the right shelf. Total beginner, rusty intermediate, or somewhere in between.
This is the Arabic of kitchens, bus stops, and corner shops. Not the formal kind you hear on the news. Ten-minute lessons built on native-speaker audio, set where the language really lives.
Coming soon to iPhone and Android. We’ll email you the day it lands.
How it works
A three-minute placement quiz puts you on the right shelf. Total beginner, rusty intermediate, or somewhere in between.
Bite-sized lessons. Audio first. Hands-free if you want.
Order coffee. Greet your neighbor. Catch a phrase in a song. Real situations from day one, not month six.
The method
Long before “dialect Arabic” was a category in any textbook, these were the sounds diplomats, journalists, and curious in-laws picked up first. We kept that tradition. Only the audio is new.
Every word reaches your ear before it reaches your eye. Five-second clips, native voices, played back until they stick. That's the old Pimsleur idea, retuned for a Palestinian rhythm.
A phonetic system for the sounds the script keeps hidden. The ʿ in ʿayn. The ḥ in ḥalāl. The q that quietly goes missing in Jerusalem. And when you want the Arabic letters themselves, ج and ح are waiting right beside it.
Every unit has an address: a fish market in Yafa, a café in Ramallah, the carpentry shop down your in-laws' alley. Learn the words and you've half-learned the place they belong to.
Built for five spare minutes and a pair of headphones. A lesson fits a phone and a bus seat. Nothing to install, no laptop, no homework to hand in. Press play, say back what you hear, and that's the lesson.
The tasting menu
Not “the cat sat on the mat.” Not “where is the library.” These are the ones you reach for first: greeting a neighbor, talking a vendor down on a watermelon, thanking the stranger who pointed you toward the bus in Akka.
#1
marḥaba
مرحبا
hello
#2
keef ḥālak?
كيف حالك؟
how are you?
#3
shukran
شكراً
thank you
#4
ṣabāḥ il-kheir
صباح الخير
good morning
#5
yalla
يلا
let's go
#6
kīf?
كيف؟
how?
#7
wein?
وين؟
where?
#8
ʔēsh ismak?
إيش اسمك؟
what's your name?
#9
ʕan jadd
عن جدّ
really
#10
mish hēk?
مش هيك؟
isn't it so?
Culture first
Words don’t stick in a vacuum. Every unit sits inside a real Palestinian dish, place, or custom, because that’s where the vocabulary belongs. Learning vegetables? You’re cooking maqluba. Numbers? You’re haggling in a market. Family words? You’re three chairs deep at someone’s wedding.
كنافة نابلسية
knāfa Nābulsiyya
Knafeh, Nablus-style
مقلوبة
maqlūba
Upside-down rice
مسخّن
musakhkhan
Sumac chicken on bread
قهوة سادة
qahwa sāda
Black cardamom coffee
Free guides
PRONUNCIATION
12 min · 28 audio clips
GRAMMAR
8 min · with audio
TRAVEL
Pocket-ready phrasebook
VOCAB
Café-by-café guide
GRAMMAR
+ how to haggle
CULTURE
Survive your in-laws
PRONUNCIATION
With slow-mo audio
VOCAB
Yes there are that many words
TRAVEL
Tested by real travelers
Honest answers
No dodges. If a question reaches us more than twice, it ends up on this list.
Eventually, yes. From your first lesson the Arabic script sits next to the transliteration, so you can lean on whichever you want. We don't formally drill the alphabet until Unit 4, but the letter shapes start sinking in from your very first knafeh order.
No. You can start from zero. Words reach you as audio first, then as a transliteration built to match how Palestinians really say them. The script comes in once you're ready for it.
Duolingo's Arabic course teaches Modern Standard, the formal Arabic of news anchors and textbooks. Nobody speaks that at home. We teach the spoken dialect of Yafa, Ramallah, Akka, and Bethlehem: audio first, real conversations, and no gems to hoard.
Yes. Palestinian Arabic is Levantine, a close cousin of what's spoken in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. Use it in Beirut, Amman, or Damascus and people follow you fine. Go as far as Egypt or the Gulf and you'll still get by, with a little adjustment.
Six to eight weeks, at ten minutes a day. Greetings, ordering food, talking about family, asking directions, getting through a short phone call. Month one is small exchanges; by month two you're in real back-and-forth conversations, mistakes and all, with people happy to forgive them.
Yes, on every word and every line. The recordings come from native speakers in Jerusalem, Ramallah, Yafa, Akka, Nablus, and Bethlehem, so you hear the accent shift from city to city instead of one flat textbook voice.
Yes. Download a lesson once and it's yours on a plane, on the metro, anywhere the signal gives out (which happens plenty in the region itself). Your streak and review queue catch up the next time you're back online.
Yes. Sign in on a phone, a tablet, or the web, and your streak, downloaded lessons, and review queue all come with you. You can switch devices mid-sentence if you want.
Leave your email. We’ll write to you the day the first lesson goes live.
Free to download · iPhone (iOS 16+) and Android (10+) · Works offline once a lesson is downloaded.