السّلام عليكم ورحمة اللّه وبركاته
Arabic is one of the most important languages in the world, with over 400 million speakers worldwide. For Muslims, it is the most important because it is the language of The Holy Qur’an.
Despite its importance and popularity, many people struggle to learn Arabic. Having studied Arabic in the West for over 4 years now, I realized that one of the main reasons is the lack of modern, popular, and intuitive tools to help you learn Arabic. While there are many excellent apps and resources available, I either had difficulty finding them or they often had poor user experiences for me to be able to use them effectively.
That’s why I built Bahar (بحر in Arabic script and pronounced baḥr or ba-har) - a modern, intuitive application designed to help you master Arabic vocabulary effectively.
Bahar allows you to build your own personal dictionary that is easily searchable and automatically generates flashcards for each word you add.
What Makes Bahar Different?
Many users commonly use either flashcard apps such as Anki or language learning apps such as Duolingo to learn languages, including Arabic. However, neither of these are the right fit for learning Arabic.
Arabic is a rich language. Not taking into consideration grammar or morphology, learning vocabulary in Arabic is more involved than most other languages. When learning nouns, we learn the singular and plural forms, at a minimum along with the root letters. When learning verbs, we learn the past tense, present tense, and verbal noun (مصدر), at a minimum again along with the root letters.
Typical language learning apps don’t focus on this when teaching vocabulary because they are designed to accommodate a wide range of languages.
Whereas with generic flashcard applications, you often need very structured and complex templates to hold the morphological information for each word you’re learning.
A common pain point is also searching across your words in these flashcard apps. Arabic text can optionally contain diacritics and as one learns vocabulary, they might input words with inconsistent diacritics, which can make it impossible to search for words as most apps’ search functionality is designed primarily with Latin letters in mind.
Bahar is designed to solve all of these problems.
Powered by a Search Engine
Under the hood, Bahar is powered by a performant search engine. What this means is that you can search across all your words, in either English or Arabic, on the translation, definition, root letters or any other field.
Automatic Flashcard Generation
Bahar automatically generates flashcards as you add words to your dictionary.
Flashcard scheduling also uses the state-of-the-art FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler) algorithm to optimize your study time, similar to existing tools like Anki.
Bidirectional Learning
Bahar automatically generates flashcards in both directions:
- Arabic → English: See the Arabic word, recall the meaning.
- English → Arabic: See the English translation, recall the Arabic word.
By default, flashcards will be Arabic to English. However, you can configure Bahar to also generate English to Arabic to strengthen both recognition and production skills.
Pricing Philosophy
Due to the early stage of Bahar, I haven’t finalized a pricing model yet, but below is my philosophy regarding pricing so that there are no surprises in the future.
TL;DR: Bahar will have a monthly subscription model. All current features will remain free forever. I will be releasing premium features in the future that will require a paid subscription to use.
As a Muslim, I believe that helping others gain knowledge, particularly related to the religion, is more important than making a profit. Because of that, I will always prioritize access to the app over financial gain.
That being said, Bahar does have server costs associated with it. There are more features planned that are more expensive to, not just implement, but also maintain and use, such as AI. Many of these features may be premium features.
Anything that is free right now will remain free. The core application functionality will always be free. I will be adopting a subscription model where you would pay monthly or annually to use the premium features.
However, anyone who genuinely benefits from Bahar but is not able to afford it will be able to use it entirely for free.
Ready to Start?
If you’re ready to start your Arabic journey, head over to bahar.dev today and start learning for free!
Stay tuned for more updates, tips, and Arabic learning resources on this blog إن شاء اللّه تعالى.