Founder note
About Nusoos
I’m Abdulrahman, an economist in Riyadh. That’s my training, anyway. My interests have wandered well outside economics over the years, and the one that stuck is languages. I grew up with Arabic and English, and I’m approaching fluency in Spanish and Chinese.
Nusoos is what I wished existed for people learning Arabic.
Why I built it
When I was learning Chinese, the reading services I used did something my lessons on their own never quite did. They let me take what I’d learned and actually use it: to read, to understand, and to enjoy the culture and the region, at a level I could handle. Every text sat a little above where I was, with audio and the vocabulary I needed built in. That’s what a graded reader does, and it’s a big part of why my progress felt fast.
When I went looking for the same thing for Arabic, my own language, I couldn’t find it. There are Arabic readers out there, and some are good. But none of them did what the best Chinese services do: level every text against a standard, give it audio, and keep track of the words for you.
So I decided to build one.
The mission
Arabic is the language of the Quran. It’s the official language of 22 countries and is spoken by more than 400 million people. People come to it for faith, for heritage, for work, or simply because they’re curious about one of the richest cultural regions in the world. Whatever your reason, you deserve material that does the language justice.
I want Nusoos to make learning Arabic more accessible, more structured and, above all, more enjoyable. The rest of this page is about how.
What Nusoos is, and what it isn’t
I’d rather you know the limits before you sign up.
A graded reader
Nusoos is a graded reader. It builds your reading and listening, and the vocabulary that comes with them. It works best alongside a course, a tutor or a textbook; it isn’t a complete method on its own, and I won’t pretend otherwise.
Fusha first
It teaches fusha, Modern Standard Arabic, first. I believe a solid fusha foundation carries over into whichever dialect you choose later, and dialect tracks are planned from B2 onwards.
Not a Quran course
It isn’t a Quran course, though it builds the foundation that Quranic Arabic rests on.
Checked by native speakers
Every text is checked by a native speaker. The texts are AI-adapted, leveled against the frameworks described below, and then reviewed by native Arabic speakers. The audio is synthesized, and native speakers check that too. If a recording sounds wrong, tell me the lesson and the word through the contact page.
How Nusoos teaches
The two hard parts
Arabic learners tend to get stuck on two things early. The first is the script itself. Letters change shape depending on their neighbours and join together into words, so you can know every letter and still not be able to read. The second is tashkil, the vowel marks, which even native speakers find hard to master fully.
So Nusoos starts before the first story. A short path takes you from letters to syllables, from syllables to words, and from words to words in sentences. Alongside it, a gamified tashkil curriculum teaches the marks themselves. Once you’re in the reader, a tashkil toggle lets you lean on the marks while you need them and switch them off when you don’t.
Leveled texts
From there, every text is leveled and tagged against the major frameworks: CEFR, ACTFL, ALECSO, BAREC, and more as the library grows. That means the grammar and vocabulary you meet at A2 are what A2 is supposed to teach, and nothing turns up before you’re ready for it.
Built to be heard
Every text also comes with audio, because Arabic was made to be heard. Pre-Islamic poetry was carried in memory for generations before anyone wrote it down, and the word Quran itself comes from the root for reciting. The earliest copies of the Quran had no vowel marks at all; the marks were invented in the first Islamic century because readers who hadn’t heard the text were misreading it. Arabic writing has always assumed a listener, so in Nusoos listening isn’t a feature. It’s practically half the method.
Remembered for you
Finally, the words you meet are remembered for you. A spaced-repetition system lives inside the reader, so a word from a story you read in March comes back in April, right around when you’d otherwise forget it. Spaced repetition is the tool that got me through Mandarin, and Arabic is a similar level of difficulty, so I think it will do the same for you.
What you’ll read
362
texts today, and growing every week
The Arab world is huge and varied, and there’s an enormous amount going on in it. I want the library to reflect that: craftsmen and legends, cities and kitchens, news and history, from the Gulf to the Maghreb.
There are 362 texts today, and the library grows every week. As it grows, Nusoos will use AI to learn what you like to read and bring you more of it. I think enjoyment is a pedagogical feature in its own right: if you’re interested, you keep reading, and the more you read, the more Arabic you absorb.
Pricing
I think everyone should have a fair shot at good Arabic material, and the prices follow from that.
Fair across countries
Prices are adjusted to the purchasing power of your billing country, so a learner in Cairo and a learner in London pay roughly the same share of what things cost at home. The language you learn in never changes the price: Nusoos is in English today, with Turkish, Indonesian and Urdu in development.
Locked in
Your price is locked. It won’t go up while you stay subscribed.
A subscription, and a founding plan
Nusoos is a subscription because that’s what funds a library that keeps growing. For the people who were here first, there’s also a founding-member lifetime plan. It’s available through launch, and it will be retired after that.
— Abdulrahman, Riyadh