QissaQuest: Arabic Letters

Before the workbooks: all 28 Arabic letters, one a day, in three short steps: hear it, trace it, say it. For a child who knows no letters yet. Free, no ads, no account.

Made for the child who does not know a single Arabic letter yet.

QissaQuest teaches all 28, one letter a day, in three short steps: hear it, trace it, say it. It is the step before workbooks, tutors and the classroom, and not a replacement for any of them.

IS THIS FOR YOUR CHILD?

Yes, if your child is roughly three to six and has not started reading Arabic. Yes, if Arabic is coming at school and you would like the alphabet to feel familiar before it does.

No, if your child already reads Arabic words. They would finish this in a month and it would not teach them more. We would rather say so now than take the download.

HOW A DAY WORKS

Each day gives one letter, in three short steps.

Listen. The letter is read aloud in Arabic by the voice already built into your device. Your child can tap the speaker and hear it again as often as they want.

Trace. The letter appears large and faint on the screen and your child draws over it with a finger. Nothing is scored and there is no way to get it wrong. A Clear button starts the letter over.

Say it. Your child says the letter out loud into the microphone. The app listens for about three seconds and answers with a cheerful "Yay!" or "Try again". To be clear about what this does: it is checking that your child spoke, not scoring their accent.

Finishing all three ends the day on a celebration screen showing how many letters your child has learned and how many days in a row they have practised.

WHAT IS IN IT

All 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet, in standard alphabet order.

It starts at Alef. Each new day brings the first letter your child has not finished yet, in alphabet order, so a letter left unfinished comes back the next day and none is skipped. Unless your child taps Next Letter, the day's letter stays the same all day, so they can come back to it after school.

A Next Letter button for the days when one is not enough.

Once all 28 are done, the letters come round again, one a day.

Progress counted as letters learned out of 28, with stages from Letter Learner up to Champion.

Arabic and English shown side by side on every screen. On a device set to Arabic, the app's own buttons and messages are in Arabic too.

Works with no internet connection.

PRIVACY

No account, no sign-in, and the app never asks for your child's name.

No ads and no in-app purchases.

The app makes no network connections at all. Nothing is uploaded, because there is nowhere for it to go.

Speech recognition runs entirely on the device. If the device cannot recognise Arabic speech offline, QissaQuest says so plainly and lets your child carry on with the lesson, rather than sending a recording away to be checked.

What the app remembers is four small values stored on the device: the letters finished, the day streak, the last day played and today's letter. Deleting the app deletes them.

WHERE IT CAME FROM

It was built for one five-year-old learning Arabic letters, and tested with him.

QissaQuest does not teach reading, writing rules, or vocabulary. It does one thing: a short daily pass over a single letter.