Day nine on Memrise. A clip plays of a man on a street corner saying the word for "now", and you've got it cold: al-aan. Then you open a community deck labelled "Levantine" and its card for "now" says hallaq. A third deck, "Palestinian", spells the same word halla2, with a 2 in it. Three cards for one word, and a review queue that treats them as unrelated facts.
That's a Memrise Arabic evening, and it's also the verdict. The drill engine is good. The Arabic riding on it is either the wrong register for talking to family, or a community deck of uncertain parentage. Three out of five, and the three are earned.
What Memrise is, and what it isn't
Memrise is a spaced-repetition vocabulary app. A word comes up, you answer, and the app decides when to show it again based on whether you got it. Its signature is the short video clips of native speakers saying the word to camera, which is what separates it from a plain flashcard deck.
As of this writing the official Arabic content centres on standard Arabic, and the dialects live in courses made by other users. Check the current course before you pay for anything, since the catalogue moves.
What it isn't is a course. There's no grammar path and no conversation practice of its own. You drill words, and that's the whole product. How to speak Arabic step by step puts a tool like this at step five, after you've got a base worth drilling.
The engine earns its points
Spaced repetition works, for a boring reason: you get asked for a word right before you'd have forgotten it. Anki does the same thing with more setup. Memrise does it with nicer clothes and a video.
The clips are the best part for Arabic in particular. The two throat sounds we write 3 and 7 don't come off a page. You learn them by watching a mouth and copying it, badly, forty times. A card that plays a real person saying a real word is the right tool for that, and Memrise has more of those clips than most apps.
Which Arabic is on the cards
The catch. The official course drills standard Arabic, the register of headlines and school exams. Every Arab learns it. Nobody uses it at the dinner table. So you can drill a thousand cards to mastery and still not know the words your Palestinian in-laws say most.
| English | Standard (the official cards) | Palestinian |
|---|---|---|
| now | ||
| heart | ||
| Jerusalem | ||
| coffee | ||
| why? |
The middle three rows are the same word on paper. In an urban Palestinian mouth the q becomes a glottal stop, so the standard card trains a sound the city never uses. The first row and the last share nothing at all. Palestinian Arabic vs MSA has the long version.
The community deck trap
The dialects are in user-made decks, and some of those are good. A few Palestinian sets were built by learners living in Ramallah. The rest are a lottery, and here's how you lose.
Romanization. One deck writes the glottal stop as 2, the next as ', and a third keeps the q because the author copied a standard spelling. So "coffee" shows up as 2ahwe, 'ahwe and qahwa, and the app counts each as its own word. We wrote the spelling system these guides use so a learner can hold one spelling still while the ear catches up.
Mixed dialects. A deck called "Levantine" might be Lebanese for the first hundred cards and Syrian for the next hundred, with a Jordanian contributor near the end. They're cousins. The small words still give you away in a sentence, and the words that mark you as Palestinian lists the ones that matter.
Audio. Plenty of community cards use text-to-speech reading a standard spelling, which will happily drill you on a q the city dropped. If a deck has no human voice on it, treat it as text.
If you go this route anyway, pick a single deck built around one city, with recorded people, and stay with its spelling. Don't merge it with the official course.
Where a vocabulary tool leaves you
Say you drilled (I want) to mastery. You know the card. You don't know that it takes possessive endings, so "you want" is biddak and "we want" is biddna, because a flashcard has nowhere to put that. The biddi guide is a few paragraphs and teaches more than the card can. Same with the b- prefix on every ordinary present-tense verb. Words without the glue between them is what Memrise leaves you with, by design.
So use it as a supplement. Take a real course, then drill the words from it. For the standard, Duolingo is the free on-ramp. For listening at length, ArabicPod101 has hours of it. For spoken Palestinian, Tfaddalu is our app: audio on every word, ten minutes a day, 3 for ع and 7 for ح, and the grammar glue taught between the words. Free to try. The best app to learn Arabic in 2026 puts all of them side by side.
Common questions
Which Arabic does Memrise teach? The official content centres on standard Arabic, the written register of news and textbooks. Dialects such as Levantine, Egyptian and Palestinian exist on Memrise as courses made by other users, and the quality of those swings from careful to unusable. Check the current course before you commit to one.
Is Memrise good for learning Arabic? For drilling vocabulary, yes. The spaced repetition works and the clips of real speakers are the best part. It isn't a course: there's no grammar path and no conversation practice of its own, so you'll need something else to learn how the words fit together.
Are the community Palestinian or Levantine courses on Memrise any good? Some are. Look for one built around a single city, with recordings of people rather than text-to-speech, and one spelling system throughout. If the glottal stop is written three different ways in the first twenty cards, close it.
Memrise or Anki for Arabic vocabulary? Same engine underneath. Memrise comes with the video clips and a finished app. With Anki you build the deck yourself and get every setting to fiddle with. If you're drilling words from a course you're already taking, Anki with your own cards tracks that course more closely. If you want something ready to open, Memrise.