Read Beginner Arabic Stories

Quick facts about Arabic

Speakers

About 411 million native speakers of all Arabic varieties and 70 million second-language users (2020–2024), according to the figures cited in Wikipedia's Arabic article.¹

Did you know?

Arabic is diglossic: Modern Standard Arabic (الفصحى) is the language of print, media, law and schooling, while people speak regional dialects in daily life. Modern Standard Arabic is generally not spoken as a first language.²

The main challenge

Verbs are built on a root of three or four consonants that carries the basic meaning, such as k-t-b 'write'; changing the vowels between the consonants and adding prefixes or suffixes marks tense, person and number.³

Sources

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Standard_Arabic
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_grammar

About the Arabic language

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_diacritics
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_grammar
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic
6. https://www.un.org/en/our-work/official-languages

Arabic reading proficiency benchmarks (ACTFL)

Framework equivalents are approximate and describe reading. ACTFL publishes how its ratings correspond to CEFR levels, not the reverse, so treat this column as a rough guide rather than an official equivalence.

Reference corpora

Word-frequency work on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) draws on very large web corpora.

• arTenTen: Belinkov, Habash, Kilgarriff and colleagues (WACL 2013) crawled 5.8 billion words of Arabic from the web in 2012, removing duplicates. At the time of writing they were tokenising, lemmatising and tagging it with the MADA tool, and planned to study how much of it is Modern Standard Arabic and how much dialect.¹
• Register: Stichos writes Arabic readers in Modern Standard Arabic (الفصحى) at every level and avoids regional dialect vocabulary, idioms and colloquialisms, so learners and tutors work from one standard form.

1. https://www.muni.cz/en/research/publications/1125225

Readability design principles

Readability formulas designed for English need Arabic-specific adaptations. Two published examples:^1,2

• OSMAN: El-Haj and Rayson (2016) adapt Flesch- and Fog-style formulas with Arabic counts of short, long and stress syllables and a Faseeh factor for features of the script. It works on text with or without diacritics.¹
• AARI: Al Tamimi and colleagues (2014) built the Automatic Arabic Readability Index from 1,196 Jordanian school texts for grades 1 to 10, using character counts, average sentence length and average word length.²
• Stichos: Stichos sets difficulty with level-by-level grammar rules and sentence-length limits rather than a single readability score.

1. https://aclanthology.org/L16-1038/
2. https://www.iajit.org/PDF/vol.11,no.4/5200.pdf

Script & grammar scaffolding

• Vowel marks: From A0 to B1 every word carries full vocalization (تشكيل: harakat, shadda, sukūn and tanwīn), and a line missing it is rewritten. From B2 the marks are no longer required.
• Tenses and moods: A0 uses only the present (المضارع). A1 adds the past (الماضي). A2 opens the general future (سوف and سـ) and basic negation. The subjunctive (المنصوب), the jussive (المجزوم) and the passive (المبني للمجهول) arrive at B1.
• The dual: The dual (المثنى) is left out at A0 and A1: two people are written as two singular sentences.
• Agreement: Non-human plurals take feminine singular agreement, as in الكُتُبُ جَدِيدَةٌ (“the books are new”).

Related academic & framework resources

• ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines: ACTFL’s description of what learners can do in reading, listening, speaking and writing, from Novice to Distinguished.
• Assigning CEFR Ratings to ACTFL Assessments: How ACTFL ratings correspond to CEFR levels, in one direction only.
• OSMAN: A Novel Arabic Readability Metric: The LREC 2016 paper by Mahmoud El-Haj and Paul Rayson.
• AARI: Automatic Arabic Readability Index: The paper by Al Tamimi, Jaradat, Al-Jarrah and Ghanem in the International Arab Journal of Information Technology.
• arTenTen: A New, Vast Corpus for Arabic: The workshop paper that introduced the corpus, with its size, crawl date and processing.

Frequently asked questions

What writing system does Arabic use?

Arabic script, an abjad written from right to left. Most everyday text leaves out the short-vowel marks (حركات); full vowel marking is kept for religious texts, children’s books and works for learners. Stichos requires full vowel marks in its A0 to B1 readers; from B2 they are not required.

Is Stichos suitable for complete beginners with zero prior knowledge (A0)?

Yes. A0 is a primary focus, designed for readers with no prior knowledge. A1 then adds basic everyday vocabulary and simple connected clauses as your foundation grows.

Are Stichos levels the same as CEFR levels?

Not exactly. Stichos levels use the familiar CEFR names, from A0 to B2, and are modelled on the CEFR (the Common European Framework of Reference), so a Stichos B1 is meant to feel close to a B1 in your course book. They aren't an official CEFR rating, and different books and exams draw the lines in slightly different places. A0 is Stichos's own addition, just below the framework's first level.

Are the stories written by AI, and how accurate are they?

Yes. Stories are generated by AI and then checked by further automated steps against the grammar and vocabulary rules for your level. That catches most problems, but it isn't a human editor, so an occasional unnatural phrase or slip can get through. Treat Stichos as practice material, and check anything you're unsure of with a teacher or a reference.

Can I read stories with explanations in my native language?

Yes. Stichos allows you to pair any target language with any native support language. You can read a Croatian story with French glosses, or a German story with Spanish explanations.

How does word lookup work while reading?

Tap or click any word for its meaning in that sentence, explained in your own language. In the full version, you can save any word to your Vocab Bank for later review.

Is the preview free, and what happens to my email?

Yes. The preview is free and needs no account. If you join the Reading List, we use your email to send your 3 free sample stories (PDF, after you confirm your address) and to let you know when we fully open. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle it.

Do stories include audio or narration?

Story narration isn't part of the preview. At launch, the Premium Audio add-on reads every story aloud in a natural-sounding AI voice, in 39 of our 40 languages (Esperanto doesn't have audio support yet).