I Built a Levantine Arabic Game#
For a while now, people have been asking me some version of:
“Okay, but how do I actually practice this?”
Fair.
Daily Derja is mostly observations. Phrases I hear. Things my kids say. Stuff I pick up in Ramle, Jerusalem, random government offices. It’s real Arabic. But reading it isn’t the same as drilling it.
There aren’t alot of great “off-the-shelf” options. Duolingo is MSA - and not really great for that either, and tutors are expensive.
So I built something.
It’s called HAKI.
حكي — “talk,” “tell it,” “say it.”
It’s a small game for learning Levantine Arabic. Not MSA. Not classroom Arabic. The kind people actually use.
You move north on a map of the Levant. You unlock vocabulary by city. Quick sessions. Ten cards at a time. Audio for everything. Spaced repetition is worked into the app by design.
The feature I cared about most:
You can switch between urban pronunciation and Bedouin pronunciation.
Because gahwe and ahwe are not the same world.
Right now the audio is clean and functional. I’m still working on getting regionally authentic TTS that actually sounds like it belongs in Amman or the Negev and not inside a polite pan-Arab robot. That part matters to me. Dialect isn’t just vocabulary, it’s sound.
Note: The text-to-speech is still really gnarly, I’m working it out and it shouldn’t be relied upon for now.
This is version 1.0. It’s lean. It works. It teaches the Arabic I hear every day.
If you’ve been reading this site and thinking, “Nice… but I need reps,” this is the reps.
If something’s broken, tell me.
If something feels off, tell me that too.
The best place to tell me is the comments.
يلا، احكي.