Tell us where you are
A three-minute placement quiz puts you on the right shelf. Total beginner, rusty from family visits, or somewhere in between.
Coming to iPhone and Android
Everyone’s laughing.
You’re smiling along.
You grew up hearing Egyptian Arabic at the table and never got to speak it back. Bel Masri teaches the dialect your family really uses, the Cairo way, audio first, ten minutes a day. Made by the people behind Tfaddalu.
Bel Masri is being built right now. Leave your email and you'll hear the day it opens on iPhone and Android, with founding pricing held for everyone on the list.
One email when it opens, the odd update before that. Unsubscribe anytime.
- Audio on every word
- Cairene, not textbook
- Ten minutes a day
بالمصري · IN EGYPTIAN
How it works
Three steps. Yalla.
Ten minutes, every day
Short lessons. You hear every word before you read it. Hands-free if you want.
Use it that afternoon
Order tea. Answer teta. Catch a line in an old Adel Imam film. Real situations from day one.
The method
Built on how Egyptians actually talk.
We start from the language as it’s spoken at home, not the Modern Standard of news anchors. You hear every word before you read it, and you pick things up in the order you’d need them on a Friday afternoon at your aunt’s.
Listen, then speak
Every word reaches your ear before it reaches your eye. Five-second clips, played back until they stick. The old Pimsleur idea, retuned for a Cairo rhythm.
Spelling that respects you
A phonetic system for the sounds the script keeps hidden. The 3 in 3ayn. The 7 in 7abibi. The q that Cairo swallows into a glottal stop, and the g Egypt says where everyone else says j. When you want the Arabic letters, they sit right beside it.
Culture as curriculum
Every unit has an address: a koshari place downtown, a balcony in Shubra, the ahwa where your uncle plays tawla. Learn the words and you've half-learned the place they belong to.
Made for mobile
Built for five spare minutes and a pair of headphones. A lesson fits a phone and a metro seat. No laptop, no homework to hand in. Press play, say back what you hear, and that's the lesson.
A first taste
The phrases
you’ll use
this week.
These come straight from the first unit of the course. Greeting your uncle properly. Telling the waiter it’s fine, really. Saying where you’re from when the taxi driver asks, because he will ask.
#1
'ahlan wa-sahlan
أهلاً وسهلاً
welcome
#2
'ezzayyak?
إزيك؟
how are you? (to a man)
#3
kwayyis, el-7amdu lillah
كويس، الحمد لله
fine, thank God
#4
ma3lesh
معلش
no worries
Ten units, eighty-odd lessons, six hundred sentences with audio. All of it Egyptian. Want in on day one?
One email when it opens, the odd update before that. Unsubscribe anytime.
Culture first
You’ll learn the words and the kitchens they live in.
Words don’t stick in a vacuum. Every unit sits inside a real Egyptian dish, street or custom, because that’s where the vocabulary belongs. Learning food words? You’re at the koshari counter. Numbers? You’re arguing over a taxi fare. Family words? You’re at the table on a Friday with everyone talking at once.
كشري
koshari
Rice, lentils, pasta, fried onions
شاي بالنعناع
shaay bel-na3naa3
Mint tea, in a glass
قهوة مظبوط
'ahwa maZbooT
Coffee, just enough sugar
كحك العيد
ka7k el-3eed
Eid cookies, powdered sugar
Honest answers
The questions everyone asks first.
No dodges. If a question reaches us more than twice, it ends up on this list.
Is the app out yet?
Not yet. The course is written and the audio is being recorded now. Leave your email above and you'll get one message the day Bel Masri opens on the App Store and Google Play. Everyone on the list gets founding pricing.
Which Arabic is this?
Egyptian colloquial, the way it's spoken in Cairo. Not Modern Standard, which nobody uses at the dinner table, and not a generic pan-Arabic mix. Every sentence in the course was written for the app, in the order you'd need it.
Will people outside Egypt understand me?
More than any other dialect. Decades of Egyptian films, series and music mean Arabs from Morocco to Iraq grew up hearing it. Speak Egyptian in Beirut or Amman and people follow you fine, usually with a smile.
Do I need to know the alphabet first?
No. You can start from zero. Words reach you as audio first, then as a phonetic spelling built to match how Egyptians really say them. The Arabic script sits beside it from lesson one, so it sinks in at its own pace.
What about the q that Egyptians don't pronounce?
We teach it the way Cairo says it: as a glottal stop in most words, and as a real q in the handful of words that keep it (like the Qur'an or al-Qahira itself). The spelling shows you which is which, so you don't learn a bookish pronunciation and have to unlearn it.
How is this different from Duolingo?
Duolingo's Arabic course teaches Modern Standard. Bel Masri teaches the dialect your family actually speaks, audio first, in real situations, and you won't be asked to translate 'the cat drinks milk'. No gems either.
How long until I can hold a basic conversation?
Six to eight weeks at ten minutes a day. Greetings, ordering food, family talk, directions, a short phone call. Month one is small exchanges. By month two you're in real back-and-forth, mistakes and all, with relatives delighted to forgive them.
Is there audio?
Yes, on every word and every sentence, voiced in Cairene Egyptian and checked by a speaker before it ships. You hear how a phrase sounds before you ever read it.
How is Bel Masri related to Tfaddalu?
Same maker, same lesson engine, different dialect. Tfaddalu teaches Palestinian Arabic. Bel Masri is the Egyptian sister, with its own course, its own audio and its own look. If your family is Palestinian, Tfaddalu is the one you want.
Why we’re building this
We built Tfaddalu for people who sat at a Palestinian table and couldn’t answer back. Then the messages started. Half of them said some version of: my family is Egyptian, when’s ours?
Egyptian Arabic has the same problem in a bigger room. Everyone has heard it. Almost nobody gets taught it. The apps hand you Modern Standard and a cartoon owl, and your teta still talks past you.
So Bel Masri gets its own course, written from the ground up in the Cairo dialect, and its own world, drawn from the homes and streets our users actually know.
Yalla.
Be first in.
Bel Masri opens on iPhone and Android soon. The list hears first, and the list gets the founding price.
One email when it opens, the odd update before that. Unsubscribe anytime.
Founding members lock in $99.99/year (about $8 a month).
Free to try at launch · iPhone and Android · Lessons work offline once downloaded.