Nur vs Rasm

Most apps rush past the Arabic alphabet in ten minutes and leave you sounding out words from a transliteration forever. Nur teaches the script itself. Seven stages take you from a single letter to a full sentence: the 28 letters on their own, their forms inside a word, the short vowels, tanween and sukoon, the long vowels, joining, and finally reading. KEY FEATURES • Every letter in three steps — hear it, trace it in the correct stroke order, then record yourself and play it back against the reference. • Stroke-order tracing that shows where the pen starts and where it goes. This is what makes ج, ح and خ stop looking identical. • 260 words across themed classes — numbers, colours, family, the body, animals, food and drink, and more. • Four practice games: spot the letter, name the letter, find them all, and build the word. • Progress you can see — mastery per letter, a streak, and an optional weekly summary. • Works on iPhone and iPad. WHAT IT COSTS Nur is free. No subscription, no in-app purchase, nothing locked behind a paywall. It is supported by ads shown between practice games. YOUR RECORDINGS Your voice stays on this device. No account, no sign-in, and recordings are never uploaded. Nur counts which lessons get finished so the hard parts of the course can be improved, and you can turn that off under Progress. REQUIREMENTS iOS 17 or later. The microphone is needed for the recording step — decline it and everything else still works.

Rasm teaches exactly one skill: reading Arabic script out loud. Not the language. You will not learn what the words mean, and that is on purpose — decoding the script is a separate skill, and it is the one most people never get around to. IT TEACHES THE SHAPES, NOT THE ALPHABET SONG Arabic letters change form depending on where they sit in a word, so the thing you actually have to know is the pair: this letter, in this position. All 34 letters across their 115 positional forms, grouped by the shapes they share rather than by alphabetical order. IT KNOWS WHAT KIND OF MISTAKE YOU MADE Most letters differ only by dots. When you misread one, Rasm can tell you that you read two dots above where there was one below — and it shows you, by lifting the wrong dots off and leaving the bare skeleton on screen for half a second before the right ones land. IT WEANS YOU OFF THE VOWEL MARKS Beginner material is written with harakat; real text is not. Rasm fades them per shape, on a schedule, until you are reading what is actually printed. IT SCHEDULES THE PRACTICE FOR YOU A proven spaced-repetition algorithm (FSRS) decides what comes back and when, from how you actually answer — never from asking you to rate yourself. Five to ten minutes a day. No advertising, no account, no tracking of any kind. Nothing leaves your phone, and it works with the network switched off.