Arabic games worth your time

Search for Arabic games and you get two kinds of result. Kids' apps with a cartoon camel that sing the alphabet, and vocabulary quizzes that show you a photo of an apple next to four Arabic words. Both are fine at what they do. Neither will get you to the point of saying anything.

One disclosure before the list: I built one of the things on it. I'll say which one and you can discount it accordingly.

Why Arabic breaks most game formats

This is worth understanding before you judge any particular app, because a lot of what feels wrong about Arabic games isn't laziness. Most word game mechanics were designed for the Latin alphabet and they don't survive the trip.

• Letter tiles and anagrams. Arabic letters change shape depending on where they sit in the word. ع alone is ع, at the start it's عـ, in the middle ـعـ, at the end ـع. Break a word into shuffled tiles and a beginner sees four shapes they don't yet recognise as one letter. Games usually solve this by showing isolated forms only, which trains you to read the form you'll see least often in real text.
• Spelling and hangman. Short vowels mostly aren't written. كتب is katab (he wrote), kutub (books), or kutiba (it was written), all three letters identical. "Spell this word" doesn't have one answer without a sentence around it.
• Typing races. Unless the learner already has an Arabic layout in their fingers, you're timing how fast they can hunt for ض, which is not an Arabic skill.

The formats that do survive are the ones built on meaning and sound instead of letter manipulation. Match the word to what it means. Hear it and pick it. Say it and find out if you were understood. Fill the gap in a sentence. Less impressive in a screenshot, and much more likely to leave something behind.

The four questions I ask

Before the list, here's what I'm actually judging these against.

1. Is there audio, in the Arabic you're learning? A vocabulary game with no sound is teaching you to recognise a shape on a screen. You will not catch that word when someone says it at conversational speed.
2. Does the word ever turn up in a sentence? Isolated nouns are the easiest thing to build and the least useful thing to own. قطة is cat. Fine. You still can't say the cat is under the chair.
3. Does it come back? If a word you missed on Tuesday doesn't reappear on Friday, you played a quiz, not a study tool.
4. Is it the Arabic you want? Almost everything defaults to Modern Standard Arabic. If your goal is talking to your in-laws in Alexandria, an MSA word list is teaching you a register they'd find funny.

Most apps pass the first. Some pass the third. Very few pass two and four together.

What's out there

Clozemaster

Sentence-based gap filling, drawn from a translation corpus. It passes the sentence test and the repetition test without any fuss, which already puts it ahead of most of the category. The Arabic is Standard, and because the sentences come from a corpus rather than a curriculum, some of them are strange in a way that's occasionally distracting. Best once you're past beginner and want volume.

Drops

Five minute sessions, illustrated vocabulary, genuinely nice to use, very good at getting people to come back. It's nouns in isolation though, so it fails the sentence test completely. Treat it as a way to build a recognition base rather than a course.

Digital Dialects

Free, no account, looks like it was built in 2009 because it roughly was. Numbers, phrases, basic vocabulary, click and go. It shows up in my search traffic more than you would expect, and I think the reason is exactly that: sometimes people want four minutes of practice without a signup flow and an onboarding survey.

Duolingo

The alphabet section is decent and worth doing if you're at zero. After that the Arabic course is noticeably weaker than the ones it's famous for, and it's Standard Arabic, so you're learning to translate sentences that no speaker of any dialect would produce.

Anki

Not a game, and included anyway, because it's the only thing here that reliably passes the repetition test. A decent shared deck of the thousand most common Egyptian words will do more for your vocabulary in three months than anything above. The cost is that it's dry and you have to do it every day. You can also export decks from here by dialect and topic if you'd rather not go hunting on AnkiWeb.

The one I built

Parallel Arabic's games run in Egyptian, Levantine, Darija or Standard Arabic, and the word list and the audio both change with the dialect, so you're not learning Fusha vocabulary with an Egyptian accent bolted on top. There are three modes:

• Multiple choice, for finding out fast which words haven't stuck.
• Listening, where you hear the word and pick the meaning. This is the one that closes the gap between reading a word and catching it in speech.
• Speaking, where you say it and get scored on whether you were understood. Mostly useful for ع, ح, ق and the emphatic letters.

Words you get wrong go into a review deck that brings them back, and you can play against your own saved vocabulary instead of a preset topic. It's free to play without an account. Where it's weakest is the sentence test: the sentence modes exist but there's less material there than in the word modes.

If everything looks like it's aimed at children

This is a common complaint and it's a fair one. The problem isn't really the cartoon styling, it's the word lists underneath. Apps built for kids teach animals, colours, shapes and fruit, because that's what you teach a six year old in any language. An adult who wants to actually use Arabic needs transport, money, work, being ill, being late, disagreeing with someone politely, and explaining that you already have a taxi.

So the thing to look for isn't a serious visual style, it's whether you get to choose the topic. If the app decides you're learning zoo animals this week, it wasn't built for you.

Where games actually fit

Games work on the recognition layer. They move a word from "never seen it" to "I know that one", and they do that well and fairly painlessly. What they don't do is get it to "I said it to a person without a three second pause first". That's a different exercise, and no amount of matching pairs will substitute for it.

Which is fine, as long as you know that's the deal. Use them for the fifteen minutes at the end of the day when you're too tired to study properly. Fifteen tired minutes is worth considerably more than the ninety minute session you keep planning and not doing.

When you want the harder version, that's talking to something instead of clicking on it.