Featured Works
A selection of products we've designed, built, and shipped.
The Brief
Textbooks and courses almost universally teach Modern Standard Arabic — the formal register used in news and official documents. But across the Arab world, people speak in regional dialects that differ from MSA enough to be mutually unintelligible in some cases. Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf, and Darija each have their own vocabulary and rhythm, leaving learners who want to hold a real conversation with a significant gap to bridge.
Playaling was built specifically to close it — using authentic YouTube content rather than scripted lessons, annotated precisely enough to be useful at the level of individual words.
The Core Experience
Instead of making generic classroom dialogues, Playaling curates real YouTube videos — vlogs, interviews, talk shows, travel tours, and comedy sketches — and turns them into interactive language lessons. As you watch, multiple subtitle layers run simultaneously: the original Arabic text, phonetic transliterations, and English translations. Hover over any word and a pop-up delivers the translation, grammatical context, and audio pronunciation instantly.
The video library is sortable by dialect — Levantine (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine), Egyptian, Gulf (Saudi Arabia, UAE, etc.), North African Darija (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia), and Modern Standard Arabic — as well as by difficulty level from Beginner to Advanced and by topic, including everyday life, history, politics, and religion.
Mobile App
The full Playaling experience is available on both Android and iOS, built with Flutter to keep a single codebase running consistently across platforms. The interactive subtitle layers, word-level dictionary, dialect filtering, and exercises all carry over from the web — nothing is stripped back for mobile. Learners can pick up a clip on the commute, tap through unfamiliar words on their lunch break, or run through a cloze exercise before bed, without losing the depth the platform is built around.
Language learning works best when it fits into daily life rather than requiring dedicated study sessions. The mobile app was designed with that in mind — making it practical to accumulate genuine exposure to real Arabic speech in the gaps of an ordinary day.
Learning Tools & Outcomes
Beyond passive watching, the platform includes active skill-building exercises. "Cloze Listen" is a fill-in-the-blank listening test where learners type out or select the missing words they just heard — a method that reinforces both comprehension and recall. General quizzes layer on top of the same annotated content, meaning every exercise is tied directly to real speech rather than invented examples.
Playaling is live on web, Google Play, and the App Store, serving Arabic learners who have no comparable alternative for dialect-focused immersive study. By grounding every lesson in authentic media, it gives learners genuine exposure to how Arabic is actually spoken across regions.