Arabic Learning Resources > Learn Quranic Arabic
Start with the Quranic Arabic Corpus at corpus.quran.com. It is free, open source, and gives you the grammar of every word in the Quran, which no paid course on this page matches for depth. It does assume you can already read Arabic script and know basic grammar terms. If you cannot, Madinah Arabic's free reading course comes first.
We sell nothing here. That is worth saying, because every result you will find for this search is a school, an app or an institute recommending itself, and none of them will tell you that the best tool for the job is free and was built by a university research group. The table below is our attempt at the page that does not exist: six named options, what each costs, what each quietly assumes you already know, and what each is bad at.
Six Quranic Arabic resources compared
Read the fourth column first. The expensive mistake in this subject is buying a course pitched above your actual reading level and then concluding you are bad at Arabic. Prices were checked on 7 September 2026 and they change; treat them as the shape of the offer, not a quote.
| Option | What it is | Cost | Assumes you already | Bad at | Our verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Quranic Arabic Corpus | Word-by-word morphology, a syntactic treebank, a dictionary and an ontology covering the whole Quran. Open source under the GNU General Public License, built by Kais Dukes at the University of Leeds and now maintained by the quran.com team. | Free | Read the script, and know what nominative, genitive and form IV mean | Teaching. No lessons, no exercises, no audio, no path through it. Still version 0.4, copyright 2009 to 2017. | Top pick. Nothing else here goes this deep, and it costs nothing. |
| Quranic (getquranic.com) | An iOS and Android app teaching Quranic vocabulary through the stories of the prophets: gamified lessons, quizzes, translation exercises and short grammar lessons. | Free tier gives one lesson every 12 hours and unlimited quizzes. Premium US$49 a year, family plan US$99 a year. The App Store also sells a Basic plan at US$4.99 and a Pro plan at US$9.99. | Know the letters | Grammar. Its own pitch is vocabulary, and the free tier's 12-hour limit sets your pace for you. | The easiest place to start, and the free tier is usable rather than a trial. |
| Bayyinah TV | Over 1,500 video lessons from Nouman Ali Khan, from reading basics up to fluency work, alongside tafsir and Islamic history. Monthly live Q&A, iOS and Android apps. | US$11 a month, with a one-year plan advertised at 15% off. Lifetime access sold separately at US$1,000. Free one-year memberships by application for people who cannot pay. | Nothing | Being a reference. It is video, so you cannot look a single word up, and you pay monthly for material you watch once. | The paid option worth paying for, at the monthly price. See below on the lifetime tier. |
| Madinah Arabic | A free online course of more than 90 lessons covering grammar and morphology, with a separate free reading course for people who cannot yet read the script. Paid one-to-one lessons in 30, 60 and 90 minute sessions alongside. | Free courses, no signup needed. Tutoring priced separately. | Nothing, if you begin with the reading course | Being Quran-specific. It teaches Arabic; the Quranic payoff is indirect. The interface is plain and dated. | The free grammar spine to run underneath everything else on this list. |
| Understand Al-Quran Academy | Recorded video courses, free on the site and on YouTube, roughly 20 hours each: reading, tajweed, then five courses walking Surat al-Baqarah verses 1 to 141 word by word, plus grammar units and a seerah course. | Recorded courses free. One-to-one tutoring is US$39 a month for eight 30-minute classes, $55 for twelve, $72 for sixteen and $90 for twenty, plus $1.50 a session for a native Arabic teacher holding an ijazah. One free trial session, no card. | Nothing. Course 1 starts from the words of the daily prayer | Production values and pace. Its claim that Course 1 leaves you understanding half of Quranic vocabulary is its own figure, not one we have checked. | The best free structured path for a beginner whose goal is the Quran specifically. |
| kalamullah.com | A free archive of Islamic books as PDF downloads, including a section of Arabic-language titles. | Free | Know which book you need, and in what order | Everything a course does. Nothing is sequenced, nothing corrects you, there is no audio, and a static archive gives you no way to tell whether an edition is current. | Rejected. It is a library, not a course. |
How we chose, and what we rejected
We ranked these on two things: what you get for nothing, and what each one assumes you already know. Depth came third. That order is deliberate. Good material on Quranic Arabic is abundant and mostly free; what kills a learner is paying for something pitched above their level and quitting inside a month.
On that test, kalamullah.com fails and we reject it. It is a genuine free library and there is nothing wrong with the books in it, but a library is not a syllabus. A beginner who cannot yet sequence their own study gets a folder of PDFs, no order to open them in, no exercises, no audio, and no feedback when they get something wrong. Every other option on the list at least tells you what to do next.
We also reject one specific product rather than a whole site: Bayyinah TV's US$1,000 lifetime tier. At US$11 a month that is more than seven years of subscription paid up front, for a video library you will work through once, from a platform that has to still exist for the purchase to mean anything. Subscribe monthly, watch what you need, cancel.
Why corpus.quran.com is the best free resource almost nobody uses
The Quranic Arabic Corpus gives you, for every word in the Quran, its root, its morphological breakdown and its grammatical role in the sentence, plus a dependency diagram of the whole verse. Nothing else on this page covers the text at that resolution, and none of the paid options come close. It is free and open source under the GNU General Public License.
The catch is the vocabulary of the labels. A word comes tagged with something like "P – prefixed preposition lām", "N – nominative masculine noun" or "V – 3rd person masculine plural (form IV) imperfect verb". If those phrases mean nothing to you, the corpus is unusable, which is why beginners bounce off it. Cover case endings and the ten verb forms first, in any grammar course, and it turns into the tool you check every difficult verse against.
Two caveats. The site still carries a version number of 0.4 and a copyright line ending in 2017, so do not expect active development. And it openly invites corrections from users, so a single tag is evidence rather than gospel. Cross-check anything surprising against a dictionary; our page on Arabic dictionaries and how root-based lookup works covers which one.
The path from nothing to reading the Quran
Take it in four stages, and do not skip the first one. Almost every resource on this page assumes stage one is done.
Stage one: the script. Learn the 28 letters, their four positional shapes, and the vowel marks. Most adults need a few weeks. Our Arabic alphabet chart gives the letters with their forms, and our guide to the harakat and the other diacritics covers the marks, which matter far more in the Quran than in ordinary Arabic because the Quran is printed fully vowelled. Madinah Arabic's free reading course and Understand Al-Quran Academy's free reading course both cover this stage from zero.
Stage two: high-frequency vocabulary. Quranic vocabulary is finite and repeats heavily, so a few hundred words carry an enormous share of the text. Work through the most common words in the Quran before you touch grammar, and use our Quran vocabulary flashcards, every ayah paired with its English translation for spaced review. The 99 Names of Allah are worth memorising at this stage too, because nearly every one sits on a common trilateral root and drags a family of everyday words in with it.
Stage three: grammar. This is where Madinah Arabic's free course or a book earns its place. You need case endings, the verb forms, and how Arabic builds a sentence without a verb "to be". The roots are the payoff: learn that كِتَاب (kitāb, book), كَاتِب (kātib, writer) and مَكْتَب (maktab, office) all sit on k-t-b, and you stop learning words one at a time. Our Arabic grammar books page lists the printed courses we rate.
Stage four: read. Open the corpus alongside a short surah and work through it word by word. Start with the thirtieth juz: short, heavily repeated elsewhere in the text, and already familiar to anyone who prays. Expect it to be slow at first. When I started, a page of the Quran took me 20 minutes; eventually it took 2. Then widen out into general Arabic vocabulary lists, because Quranic Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic share nearly all of their grammar and most of their core words.
Tajweed: we do not teach it, and here is who does
We do not teach tajweed. Tajweed is the set of rules governing how the Quran is recited aloud: which letters assimilate into which, and how many counts a vowel is held. It is taught orally and corrected by ear, and traditionally passed from a teacher who holds a chain of certification. A written page cannot hear you, so a written page cannot teach it, and anything we published here would be a summary of somebody else's teaching.
Here is who does. Understand Al-Quran Academy's free recorded course "Learn Tajweed the Easy Way" is the no-cost starting point, and the same academy will add a live teacher with an ijazah for $1.50 a session on top of its normal rates once you want your recitation corrected. In print, Al-Qaidah An-Noraniah in the table below is the standard beginner method and comes with a video walkthrough. I worked through it myself, and it is the one book here I would hand a beginner without qualifying the recommendation.
Know this before you spend money: tajweed and comprehension are separate skills. Plenty of people who have finished a tajweed course still cannot tell you what the verse means. Everything else on this page is about the second skill.
Books, courses and tools we recommend
The list below is the wider set of Quran-specific material we point people at: printed grammar courses, colour-coded tajweed mushafs, graded readers and free word lists. For the spoken side, our page on Islamic phrases in Arabic and when to say them covers the expressions you will hear every day.
| Resource | Description |
|---|---|
| Al-Qaidah An-Noraniah | The best way to learn proper tajweed in a format that helps you remember. Use the accompanying audio as a guide on how to use the book. |
| Arabic Through the Qur'an | Teaches Arabic grammar by using the Quran and all vocabulary is from the Quran. Each chapter consists of grammar concepts, vocabulary, and practice translating the Quran from Arabic to English. |
| Udemy Quran | A course on Udemy on the Quran. Learn the Alphabet and Arabic grammar. |
| Essentials of Quranic Arabic | A very detailed book about grammar of the Quran. Includes a lot of examples from the Quran. One of the best grammar explanation books out there. |
| Corpus Quran | Definitions and grammar explanations of the Quran. Includes Quran grammar rules and syntax mappings. |
| Wiktionary | Vocabulary frequency lists from the Quran with definitions. |
| Quran Tajweed | Quran with tajweed color coding. |
| Quran Arabic English | A Quran in Arabic and English. Has tajweed coloring and explanations. |
| Stories Of The Prophets (Qisas an-Nabiyin) | This book is designed for people learning Arabic. It starts out with simple sentences and gets more difficult as you work through the book. Created by Sayyed Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi. Arabic & English Version. Vocabulary List |
| Omar Ibn Khattab Series | A historical series about Omar Ibn Khattab. Great for Islamic history and improving your skills in Fusha. |
| Qasid Online Classical | An online course for learning classical Arabic with the goal of understanding the Quran. The center is based in Jordan. |
Frequently asked questions
Can I learn Quranic Arabic for free?
Yes, and the free options are stronger than the paid ones. The Quranic Arabic Corpus gives the grammar of every word in the Quran at no cost, Madinah Arabic hosts a free 90-plus-lesson grammar course and a free reading course, and Understand Al-Quran Academy puts its recorded courses on its site and on YouTube for nothing. Paying buys a teacher and a schedule, not better material.
Do I need to learn tajweed to understand the Quran?
No. Tajweed governs how the Quran is recited aloud; understanding it is a question of vocabulary and grammar. They are separate skills and can be learned in either order. Most learners pick up basic tajweed alongside reading because both are taught from the same beginner material, but you can read and understand the text without ever studying the recitation rules formally.
Should I learn the Arabic script before learning Quranic vocabulary?
Yes. Every serious Quranic Arabic resource assumes you can read the script, and word-by-word tools are unusable without it. Learning the 28 letters and the vowel marks takes most adults a few weeks. Madinah Arabic and Understand Al-Quran Academy both publish a free reading course that starts from zero.
Is corpus.quran.com good for beginners?
Not on its own. It labels every word with terms like nominative masculine noun and form IV imperfect verb, which mean nothing until you have covered basic grammar. It is the best free reference in existence for Quranic Arabic and it is not a course. Take a beginner grammar course first, then use the corpus on every difficult verse.
How long does it take to learn Quranic Arabic?
There is no honest single number, but the free material shows the scale. Understand Al-Quran Academy's recorded courses run about 20 hours each and there are several; Madinah Arabic's free grammar course has more than 90 lessons. Reading the script takes weeks. Following a page of the Quran without a translation takes years of regular study.