01What Mondly’s Arabic course teaches
Which Arabic. Mondly teaches Modern Standard Arabic: its own page on how to speak Arabic says MSA “is the form of Arabic you’ll be learning with Mondly.” (Mondly uses “Fus-ha” for the classical form only; Arabic speakers, and this site, use fuṣḥā for both.) Its language list has one “Arabic” and no Egyptian or Moroccan course, so if you searched for Mondly’s Egyptian or Moroccan Arabic, Mondly does not offer it.
How it is built. Mondly is one app for 41 languages, and Arabic uses the same format as the others: short lessons grouped by everyday topic (hello, family, travel, food, shopping), vocabulary builders, conversations, a daily lesson, weekly quizzes and monthly challenges. Mondly says Premium has more than 250 lessons in 40 topics. Those figures are for the app as a whole, not counted for Arabic.
How far it goes. Mondly’s FAQ says its courses run from beginner to upper-intermediate, “A1 to B2”, and its methodology page says every lesson is aligned with Pearson’s Global Scale of English. That scale was built for English, so treat the level as Mondly’s description, not as an Arabic exam level.
Script, grammar and speaking. Lessons can show the Arabic script or a Latin transcription, which you switch on or off. Grammar comes mostly from use: Mondly says you pick it up without studying the rules, with a conjugation table you can open on any verb. Speaking runs on speech recognition, and an Arabic chatbot holds short conversations. Mondly has belonged to Pearson since 2022.
02What Mondly does well
It is easy to start and pleasant to use. Lessons take a few minutes, the topics are practical, and the transcription toggle lets a complete beginner say a phrase before they can read it. It is rated 4.7 on the US App Store from more than 33,000 ratings and 4.5 on Google Play. Leaderboards add a little competition if that keeps you going.
It suits travel and phrase-first goals: if you want to order food, ask directions and greet people politely in standard Arabic, Mondly’s topic structure fits. It also offers Arabic in virtual reality (Mondly VR) and 40 other languages in the same app, which matters if Arabic is one language among several.
Its free plan lets you try it: a daily lesson, the whole “Hello” category and one chatbot lesson, plus a 7-day Premium trial (it converts to a paid plan unless cancelled). The App Store lists Premium at 15.90 USD a month or 74.90 USD a year in the US (14,99 € or 69,99 € in France), and Mondly’s web shop was running a sale when we checked.
03What to check before you pay
Mondly’s Arabic pages give no lesson count for Arabic, and none of the pages we read says whether AI Conversations, a Premium feature, covers Arabic. Its free plan includes a chatbot lesson, so test the things that matter for Arabic before paying:
Write one sentence of your own, not one from the lesson. Do you learn what is wrong in it, and why? Say a word with ḥāʾ (ح) or qāf (ق) badly on purpose. Is the mistake caught, and do you learn which sound was off? Turn the transcription off after a week. Can you still read the lesson? And if your goal is to read books or the news, look for where the course teaches the case endings and the verb patterns as rules you practise.
If the answers satisfy you, Mondly may be all you need for now. If not, those are the four things Kalima is built around; judge whether they matter for your goal.
04What Kalima does differently
One language, one long path. Kalima teaches only fuṣḥā, never a dialect, along a map of 120 concepts: from the 28 letters up to reading unvowelled classical prose, which covers the Modern Standard Arabic of news and books too. Grammar is taught as a system: you learn the rule, see it in examples, then use it.
A tutor that corrects your own Arabic. You write or speak to Bahir, an AI tutor who replies in fully vowelled fuṣḥā. When your sentence has a mistake, a correction card shows the corrected sentence and explains why, in English or French. You are not picking the right tile: you are building the sentence, and you learn what was wrong with it.
Pronunciation scored letter by letter. A drill scores your recording on eight contrasts learners miss, such as ḥāʾ against hāʾ, qāf against kāf, ṣād against sīn and ʿayn against hamza. It tells you which letter you got wrong, not only that the word was off.
Handwriting checked from a photo. Beginners write letters on paper and take a photo; readers write a dictation. Kalima reads the photo and checks each letter or word, so your handwriting gets practised too, not only your typing.
Progress you have to prove. A concept counts as acquired only after you use it correctly in your own sentence on a second, different day. Words you meet come back on a spaced-repetition schedule (Mondly has a vocabulary review too), and a serialized story at your level has a new episode each day.
05Kalima’s limits, plainly
The first session with Bahir is free, and everything that needs no AI stays free: the alphabet, letter cards, the curriculum map and dictionary look-ups. Kalima Pro costs 14.99 USD a month or 149.99 USD a year, shown in your local currency. Its monthly price is close to Mondly’s; Mondly’s yearly plan costs about half as much.
Kalima runs on the web at kalima.chat/app and on Android; there is no iPhone app yet. It teaches Arabic only, with no VR and no leagues or points.
06Mondly or Kalima: which suits you?
Choose Mondly if you want travel phrases fast, like short game-like lessons, learn several languages, want to read Arabic through a transcription at first, or need an iPhone app today.
Choose Kalima if you want to read and write fuṣḥā properly: the script from the first letter, grammar as a system, your own sentences corrected with explanations, your pronunciation scored on the sounds that matter, and a path that goes on to books and classical texts.
Using both is reasonable too: phrases on Mondly, structure and feedback on Kalima. What you learn on one carries over, since both teach standard Arabic.