Aravoca started in my kitchen. My son — a heritage speaker who grew up hearing Arabic at home but not owning it — had just begun GCSE Arabic as a first language, and the gap between "understands it at the dinner table" and "writes it in an exam" turned out to be enormous.
The apps built for beginners spent week one on "apple, cat, table" — words he already knew. The textbooks built for native speakers assumed a written vocabulary he didn't yet have. And the exam syllabus expected him to read and write confidently across topics he'd only ever discussed in speech.
What he actually needed was simple, but nothing offered it: a way to acquire written Arabic vocabulary in the order that most unlocks the language, reinforced inside sentences he could actually read without stopping to look things up.
So I started building one. For him, at first.
Two ideas do most of the work in Aravoca, and both come from how language actually gets acquired rather than how it's traditionally taught.
Teach the most common words first. The top 1,000 Arabic words cover roughly 80% of everyday speech. Learning them in frequency order means every word picked up instantly unlocks more of what you read and hear. Every early win is a real one.
Only show sentences the learner can actually read. Each example is built from words already learned, plus exactly one new word. No paralysis. No dictionary dives. Just context doing its job — the way fluent speakers got there.
For my son, it closed his vocabulary gap without the guilt-loop of a generic app or the opacity of a native-speaker textbook. A year later, it's Aravoca.
I've spent twenty-five years in technology — shipping software across startups and larger teams — and a good chunk of that same stretch learning Arabic myself. Aravoca is the first thing I've built where those two threads meet directly.
The engineering side keeps the product honest: spaced-repetition scheduling that respects your time, a frequency corpus that's auditable, and a UI that gets out of the way. The learner side keeps it kind: I know what it's like to stare at a page of Arabic and feel nothing click, and I've designed Aravoca so that almost never happens.
What began as a tool for one GCSE student now works for anyone serious about Arabic — heritage learners closing a vocabulary gap, adult learners starting from scratch, students preparing for exams, and curious minds who just want to read a news headline and understand it.
The approach doesn't change with the learner. Frequency first. Context always. Ten focused minutes a day, growing on itself.
No credit card, no timer, no tricks. Start with the words that matter most.
Start learning free →