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 I pick up in Ramle, Jerusalem, random government offices. The Arabic that actually lives in the street.
But reading about dialect isn’t the same as producing it. Recognition is one thing. Retrieval is another.
And there aren’t a lot of great off-the-shelf options.
Duolingo is MSA — and not especially strong even at that.
Memrise decks are uneven.
Tutors are great, but expensive and time-bound.
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. Vocabulary unlocks by city. Practice sessions are short — ten cards at a time. Audio for everything. Spaced repetition is built in by design, so you’re actually reviewing instead of just collecting words.
The feature I cared about most:
You can switch between urban and Bedouin pronunciation — between gahwe and ahwe.
That distinction carries real social weight. It signals region, background, and context in ways that matter if you’re trying to sound like you belong.
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, not inside a polite pan-Arab robot. Dialect lives in sound. If the sound is wrong, the whole thing feels off.
This is version 1.0. It’s lean. It works. It teaches the Arabic I hear every day.
If you’ve been reading Daily Derja 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 comments are the best place.
يلا، احكي.
Jacob
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