You write your first Busuu exercise, a few lines about what you had for breakfast, and post it. By evening three strangers have corrected it. One's in Cairo, one's in Riyadh, one's in Casablanca. All three fixed the same verb ending. Not one of them would use that verb ending talking to their own mother.
Short answer: yes, Busuu has Arabic. The course teaches Modern Standard Arabic, the written register. As of this writing there's no Levantine, Egyptian or Palestinian option, and no dialect setting to switch on.
Whether that's a problem depends on what you opened the app for.
What Busuu's Arabic course is
Busuu is known for lessons that run in a set order, a study plan that tells you what to do today, and a community of native speakers who correct the sentences you write and the audio you record. The Arabic course sits inside that same shape. Lesson counts and level labels shift, so check the current course before you decide anything based on a number.
The register doesn't shift. It's fuS7a, Modern Standard Arabic, the Arabic of subtitles, headlines and school exams. Every Arab learns it as a school subject. Nobody speaks it at home. Palestinian Arabic vs MSA walks through how far apart the two are. The short version: the everyday words change once people stop reading and start talking, and so does the sound of q.
The correction feature is real
Credit first. Most apps grade you with a machine. Busuu puts a person on it, and a person notices things software doesn't, like the preposition you keep getting wrong, or the word that's technically correct and nobody would pick. Getting a paragraph back with red marks from someone in Amman is a good thing. If you're heading for reading, writing or an exam in the standard, that loop is worth more than any streak.
It's a writing loop, though, and a Modern Standard one. The exercises are in the standard, so the corrections push you toward the standard. Your speaking recordings get the same treatment. Someone tells you your 7 sounded like an English h, which is useful, and they tell you it inside a sentence nobody says out loud.
Corrected into the wrong register
Here's the part the feature can't fix. The person from Casablanca and the person from Riyadh will both correct your written Arabic to the same thing, because they learned the same standard at school. Ask each of them how they'd say "I want a coffee" at home and you'd get two answers with barely a word in common. Neither would match Ramallah.
So the corrections are accurate, and they point somewhere you weren't going. The left column is what Busuu will correct you toward. The right is what a Palestinian says.
| English | Modern Standard | Palestinian |
|---|---|---|
| I want | ||
| coffee | ||
| here | ||
| now | ||
| how? |
Take coffee. Same root on paper. In the mouth, the deep q of collapses to a glottal catch in urban Palestine, so you hear . A Busuu corrector would be right to mark 'ahwe wrong in a written exercise. Your mother-in-law would find qahwa a bit much at breakfast.
Who Busuu Arabic is for
- You want to read. The news, say, or a university course in the standard. Having a person mark your writing speeds that up.
- You're sitting an exam or a placement test in the standard.
- You already learn a dialect somewhere else and want a written habit on the side. Most educated Arabs carry both, and the two don't fight.
It's the wrong pick if the reason you're learning is a person. A partner's family in Nablus, say, or a grandmother in Haifa. Busuu spends your months on the register they switch out of the moment the newsreader stops talking. We wrote about the same trap with Duolingo and Rosetta Stone. Busuu made the same call, with a better feedback loop attached. Which Arabic dialect should you learn helps you pick a country once you've decided on speech.
What to use for a Palestinian family instead
For a listen-and-repeat course you can do in the car, Pimsleur's Eastern Arabic is real spoken Levantine, tilted Syrian and Lebanese. Our Pimsleur review covers where it runs out. Mango Languages has a separate Levantine course, short dialogues with a breakdown, often free through a public library. For correction, the thing Busuu does well, a tutor on italki from the city your family lives in does it in the right dialect.
Tfaddalu is our app, so weigh this accordingly. It teaches spoken urban Palestinian, the Arabic of Jerusalem, Ramallah and Bethlehem, with a recording on every word, ten minutes a day, and spelling in plain letters with 3 for ع and 7 for ح. Free to try. Week one is words like (good) and (come in, go ahead), which no standard course hands you because the standard does without them. The full Levantine shortlist, with Busuu in the table, is in the best app to learn Levantine Arabic. And if you came here from Babbel, that app has no Arabic at all.
Common questions
Does Busuu have an Arabic course? Yes. Busuu teaches Arabic, and the course is Modern Standard Arabic, the register of newspapers and school textbooks. As of September 2026 there's no Levantine, Egyptian or Palestinian course on Busuu. Check the current course page before you sign up, since apps do add and rename things.
Are the Busuu community corrections in Modern Standard Arabic? In practice, yes. The people correcting you are native speakers from all over the Arab world, and the exercises they're correcting are written in the standard, so they correct you toward the standard. That's useful for writing. It tells you nothing about how any of them talk at home.
Can I learn Levantine or Palestinian Arabic on Busuu? Not from the course itself. You'd learn to read and write the standard, and you'd be understood if you spoke it, since every Arab learns it at school. You wouldn't understand the answer, because the answer comes back in dialect.
Is Busuu Arabic worth it? For reading, writing and exam-style Arabic, it's a reasonable choice, and having a person mark your sentences is something most apps don't offer. For talking to family in Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon or Syria, spend the same minutes on a dialect course.