Our top pick for learning Arabic free is the Foreign Service Institute course set: US government material, public domain, no account, no ceiling. Pair it with Anki for vocabulary and one free grammar course. That combination never starts asking for money. Most other resources sold as free are free only up to a limit we name.
This page was reviewed in August 2026. Prices, free tiers and lesson caps change constantly, so check the current terms before you sign up for anything named here.
What is genuinely free, at a glance
Free splits into three kinds: free forever with no paid tier at all, free up to a ceiling you will eventually hit, and a free trial that is really a purchase with a delay. Almost every list of free Arabic resources mixes all three together. This table separates them.
| Resource | What you get for nothing | What it costs after the free tier | Our verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Foreign Service Institute Arabic courses | Full courses, textbooks and audio, MSA and several dialects | Nothing. There is no paid tier. The material is US government public domain | Top pick. Free forever |
| Anki | Spaced-repetition flashcards, unlimited decks, sync | Free on desktop, Android and the web. The iPhone app is a one-off purchase | Keep. Free forever on three platforms |
| Madinah Arabic free content | Reading course, grammar course, vocabulary lists, quizzes, video library | The free section stays free. One-to-one lessons with their teachers are paid | Keep. Best free structured grammar course |
| OpenArabic charts, word lists and Anki decks | Alphabet, numbers, phrases, weekdays, verb tables, vocabulary lists with decks | Nothing. No account, no email, no export limit | Ours, and free forever |
| Living Arabic Project dictionary | Classical, Egyptian and Levantine dictionary, searchable by root | Nothing on the web version | Keep if you are learning a dialect |
| r/learn_arabic | Answers to specific questions from people who read Arabic | Nothing | Keep for questions a book will not answer |
| The Quran text and recitations online | Fully vowelled Arabic with audio by dozens of reciters | Nothing | Keep. The best free reading practice text there is |
| Mango Languages | Complete Arabic courses, free with a participating library card | Free only through your library. Direct subscriptions start at $9.99 a month | Keep, if your library is on the list |
| Duolingo Arabic | The whole Modern Standard Arabic course, with ads | Mistakes are rationed by hearts on mobile. Super Duolingo removes the ads and the hearts | Supplement only. Our reasons are below |
| ArabicPod101 | A free account with a slice of the lesson library, no card needed | The full library, transcripts and study tools are a subscription, and the premium trial is time-limited | Good listening. Not a course |
| Arabic Online (First Steps) | Sample lessons from an EU-funded beginner course | The full A1 to A2 program is 99 pounds for 12 months | The free part is a taster, not a course |
| YouTube Arabic channels | Unlimited lessons, listening and native media | Nothing to watch. There is no correction and no way to check your answers | Supplement. Never the plan |
| Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur, Babbel | A few days of access | The trial is the ceiling. These are subscriptions with a delayed bill | Rejected. Not free courses |
The Arabic word for free of charge is مجاني majjani. The word you want to check for on a pricing page is the English one next to it.
How we chose what goes on this list
Every entry had to pass three tests, and anything that failed one was either marked as limited in the table or named in the rejection list further down.
- Is it free without a countdown running? A trial is a purchase you have not made yet, and it goes in the rejected column no matter how good the product is.
- Does it teach the script? Anything that runs on transliteration is a phrasebook. Arabic normally leaves out the short vowels, so a learner who never leaves English letters cannot read a real sentence.
- Would we still be using it in month six? Nearly everything free survives week one. Anki and the Foreign Service Institute audio are the two that stayed in daily use for years.
Nothing in the free-forever rows pays us a commission, because none of those resources has anything to sell. This is not a survey of the whole market either. It is what one adult learner and this site have actually used, plus the limits we checked in August 2026. For paid options next to the free ones, our comparison of the method we actually used, stage by stage puts both in the same order of study.
Foreign Service Institute courses: the best free Arabic course online
The Foreign Service Institute courses are the strongest free Arabic material on the internet, because they were built to take a US diplomat from nothing to working fluency and were then released into the public domain. There is no free tier to run out of, no account, and no upsell. Full textbooks in PDF and hundreds of hours of audio, for Modern Standard Arabic and for several dialects.
They are mirrored on two sites. FSI Language Courses states plainly that the material is "100% free – US government public domain". Live Lingua hosts a larger Arabic set, 54 courses with 141 ebooks and 974 audio files as of August 2026, including Peace Corps material for dialects that almost nothing else covers.
The honest weakness is age and delivery. The recordings are drill-heavy, the printing is from the typewriter era, and nothing adapts to you. Read a lesson, then drill the audio until you can produce the sentence without the page. Treat the course as a book with a tape, because that is what it is.
Anki: the free app that outlasts every free app
Anki is the one free tool we recommend without reservation, and it has no Arabic content of its own. It is a spaced-repetition flashcard program that schedules each card to come back just before you would forget it, and you fill it with the exact words and rules giving you trouble. It is free on desktop, free on Android, free on the web, and a one-off paid app on iPhone.
I used it at every stage: the letters first, then vocabulary, then whole grammar rules as cloze cards, and it is still open every morning. Ten minutes a day beats an hour on Saturday, and the schedule is what makes that true rather than any feature you can see.
You do not have to build decks from scratch either. Our vocabulary lists with ready-made Anki decks cover the Al-Kitaab word lists and A New Arabic Grammar chapter vocabulary in both a plain file and an importable deck.
A free grammar course, worked front to back
The best free structured grammar course for a self-studier is the Madinah Arabic free content section, which puts a reading course and a full grammar course online with quizzes and a video library, and does not ask for a signup to read them. It teaches from the Madinah series, which ramps more gently than the classic reference grammars and expects nothing on day one.
Pick one course and finish it. Sampling four free grammar courses teaches you chapter one four times. When you eventually want a book with exercises and an answer key so you can mark your own work, our list of Arabic grammar books with an answer key names which ones a self-studier can survive alone and which need a teacher.
Our own free reference charts
Everything on this site is free to read, with no account and no email gate, and the reference charts are built to be printed or kept open in a tab. They exist because the free versions we could find elsewhere were either images, which no screen reader and no search engine can read, or word lists with the script missing.
- A printable Arabic alphabet chart with every letter form, showing each letter isolated, initial, medial and final, with its sound.
- A free Arabic verb conjugation grid, one sound verb through every person and tense, with the spoken dialect forms beside the written ones.
- The weekdays in five varieties of Arabic, plus which day the week starts on in which country.
- Arabic colour vocabulary, including the plural forms that the textbook lists leave out.
The full index of what we have, free and paid, is our full library of Arabic learning resources, sorted by what each category is for.
Free listening and reading, once you can decode
The cheapest way to improve after the alphabet is input, and input in Arabic is free in a way it is not in most languages. Two sources carry most of the work.
The first is the Quran, which is the largest body of fully vowelled Arabic in existence, free in text and in audio from dozens of reciters. It is why my reading speed moved at all: we timed a single page, and at first it took 20 minutes, and eventually 2. You do not need to be Muslim to use it as graded reading, and our Quran learning resources cover the free text sites and the color-coded editions.
The second is native media. Most of it is on YouTube for nothing, including full cartoon series in Egyptian Arabic, which are the easiest real listening a beginner will find. Our list of Arabic TV, films and cartoons to watch names the channels and says which dialect each one is in, which matters more than the show. If you have not picked a dialect yet, start from our dialect comparison.
The part that is hard to get for free: someone to correct you
Speaking is where free study stalls, because nothing free will tell you that your ع ayn sounds like an a. Reading, grammar and flashcards all work alone. Free speaking does not, and no app on this page fixes it.
My own tutor was a family member who had studied at an institution in France, and we had lessons over Skype every weekday for more than a year. That cost nothing, and it was worth more than everything else on this page put together. If you have someone in your family, your mosque or your local university who reads Arabic and will listen to you for twenty minutes a week, ask them before you download anything.
If you do not, the free substitutes are language exchange apps and conversation partners, where you trade English practice for Arabic practice. They work once you can build a sentence and are useless before that. When you are ready to pay for one hour a week, which is the single purchase we would make first, our list of Arabic tutors and what they charge covers the marketplaces and the going rates.
What we skipped, and why
Four things get recommended constantly on lists like this one, and none of them is part of our answer. Here is the reason in each case.
Free trials sold as free courses
Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur and Babbel all appear on "free Arabic" lists and none of them belongs there. A trial is a subscription with the bill delayed a few days, and a few days is not long enough to learn the alphabet properly, let alone anything after it. Judge these as paid products, on whether they are worth the money, and never plan a study routine around a countdown.
App store phrasebooks that never show the script
The free Arabic apps that rank in the app stores are mostly ad-supported phrasebooks that teach through transliteration, which means you finish them unable to read a street sign. Arabic normally omits the short vowels, so the three letters of كتب can be read kataba, meaning he wrote, or kutub, meaning books. English letters hide that problem instead of teaching you to solve it. If an app never shows you Arabic script, it is not teaching you Arabic.
Google Translate as a study tool
Google Translate is fine for getting the gist of an Arabic paragraph and bad as a source of Arabic you intend to learn. It gives no diacritics, so you cannot tell how a word is pronounced, and it flattens dialects into Modern Standard Arabic, so what it hands back is not what anyone says to you in Cairo or Amman. Keep it for reading, and look words up in a real dictionary that shows the root.
Chatbots as your Arabic teacher
An AI assistant answers any Arabic question instantly and in fluent English, and it will sometimes hand you a word with the wrong vowels, or a dialect spelling quietly corrected toward fusha. A beginner cannot see the difference, which is the problem. Use one to re-explain a rule you already met in a course, and check any Arabic it produces against a dictionary before it goes into Anki.
A free first month, concretely
If you want the plan rather than the reasoning, this is what four weeks of free study looks like.
- Weeks 1 and 2. Thirty minutes a day on the alphabet, from the Foreign Service Institute audio with our alphabet chart open beside it. Write each letter by hand in all four forms. Put every letter into Anki on day one. Stop reading transliteration after day three.
- Week 3. Read short vowelled words aloud daily, from the Quran text or any children's book, and time yourself on a fixed passage so you can watch the number fall. Keep adding to Anki.
- Week 4. Open lesson one of the Madinah Arabic grammar course and do every exercise. Find one person who reads Arabic and read your work aloud to them.
That is the whole free method. The one thing it cannot give you is correction, and everything else on this page is an extra.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best way to learn Arabic for free?
Work through the Foreign Service Institute Arabic courses, which are US government material in the public domain and have no paid tier at all, and put every new word into Anki the same day. Add a free grammar course such as the Madinah Arabic free content section, and read fully vowelled Arabic aloud every day. That plan costs nothing and it is the plan we would give a paying student.
How can I learn Arabic by myself?
Learn the 28 letters first, from something with audio, so you never fix a wrong sound. Then pick one grammar course and finish it instead of sampling four. Read a short vowelled passage aloud daily and time yourself so you can watch the number fall. Review vocabulary in Anki every morning. The part self-study cannot give you is correction, so find one person who reads Arabic and will listen to you once a week.
Is there a Duolingo for Arabic?
Yes. Duolingo has a Modern Standard Arabic course, free with ads, and on mobile your mistakes are rationed through the hearts system unless you pay for Super Duolingo. We treat it as a supplement rather than a method: it explains no grammar, it has you tapping prepared word tiles instead of producing Arabic, and it keeps transliteration in front of you long after you should have dropped it.
Are free Arabic courses online actually free?
Some are and most are not. Foreign Service Institute material is public domain with no ceiling anywhere. Anki is free on desktop, Android and the web. Madinah Arabic keeps a genuinely free content section. But ArabicPod101 gives a free account and sells the full library, Arabic Online sells the complete A1 to A2 program for 99 pounds a year, and Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur and Babbel offer trials, not free courses. Prices and free tiers change, so check before you sign up.
Can you become fluent in Arabic without paying anything?
You can get to reading and understanding Arabic for nothing, because the courses, the dictionary, the flashcard software and the reading material are all free. Speaking is where free study stalls, since it needs someone to correct you. My own tutor was a family member, which is why my lessons cost nothing. If nobody around you reads Arabic, one paid hour a week is the single purchase worth making.