I Built a Tool to Drill My Arabic. You Can Use It Too.

I built something for Arabic for Nerds that I actually wanted to use myself.

It is called the Drillomator.

The tool drills vocabulary (المفردات – al-mufradāt), verb conjugation (تصريف الأفعال – taṣrīf al-afʿāl), harakat (حركات – ḥarakāt), synonyms (مرادفات – murādifāt), antonyms (أضداد – aḍdād), Egyptian Arabic (العامية المصرية – al-ʿāmmiyya al-miṣriyya), Levantine Arabic (العامية الشامية – al-ʿāmmiyya ash-shāmiyya), and a few other things that tend to disappear from your brain precisely when you need them.

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➤ You can try the Drillomator here.

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I still believe in knowing things

I have always believed that knowing a lot of words matters. AI has not changed that.

The more words you carry around in your head, the more connections you can make. Even passive vocabulary helps. You recognize roots, notice patterns, guess meanings and develop a feel for what belongs where.

Yes, learning things by heart sounds suspiciously like the 1990s. I am fine with that.

I believe in some boring work: memorizing things, forgetting them, seeing them again and slowly turning them into something your brain can use without asking permission first.

That also helps when you hit one of those learning plateaus where nothing seems to move anymore. You need material in your head before you can combine it, play with it or become creative with it.

AI can find a word for you in half a second. Very useful. But there is still a difference between a word being inside a machine and a word being inside your head.

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I learned Arabic the Arab way

My own route into Arabic probably explains some of this.

I studied Arabic only in Arab countries and Arabic-speaking environments. I never studied Arabic at a European or American university. I know many people who did, so I have seen the differences, but that was simply not my path.

And the way I learned Arabic involved a lot of drilling.

Especially synonyms and antonyms.

You learn one word. Then somebody asks for another word with roughly the same meaning. Then the opposite. Then another synonym. Your quiet vocabulary lesson has suddenly become an interrogation.

I came to appreciate it.

If you know several ways to express roughly the same idea, reading becomes easier and speaking becomes less fragile. Writers do not restrict themselves to the one word you happened to learn in chapter six of your textbook. Neither do people.

So the Drillomator includes dedicated synonym and antonym drills. That part comes directly from the way I learned Arabic myself.

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Then there were the verbs

I also noticed that I sometimes hesitated over verb forms I simply do not use very often.

I, he, she, singular you and probably we? Usually fine. Those forms do most of the heavy lifting.

But what if you suddenly need to address five women? In a text where you need the passive voice?

Admittedly, this may not be the linguistic emergency that ruins most people’s Tuesday. But the form exists. Eventually, producing it should be habit rather than archaeology.

The same goes for things such as weak verbs in the jussive. I do not want to spend several seconds rebuilding a form every time I need it. I want the machinery to work.

So I built the Verb Drill.

It makes you produce forms instead of admiring them in a conjugation table.

+Plus subscribers can choose particular persons, stems, verb groups and weak-letter patterns, or simply enter one specific verb and drill that one until it behaves. And at the end of the drill, you will see the verb in action in real-world examples.

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And then there are those tiny vowels

Reading Arabic fluently also means developing a feel for how an unvowelled word should sound.

That led to the Harakat Drill: you see a noun and choose the correctly vocalized form.

Arabic being Arabic, there are cases where more than one vocalization is possible depending on meaning or analysis. The Drillomator is a training engine, not a medieval grammatical tribunal. I have tried to keep the questions useful rather than turn every answer into a footnote contest.

Afterwards, you can inspect things such as the root, pattern and morphology. So even a wrong answer can be put to work.

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Fresh words every day

The vocabulary drills are deliberately not built like a classic spaced-repetition queue.

• Every day, the Drillomator creates a fresh set from the database.
• The algorithm picks words randomly, and words from previous days can return from time to time.

What it does not do is keep feeding you every word you got wrong until you finally defeat it.

That is intentional.

With a large database, strict repetition can quickly turn into a traffic jam. Yesterday’s mistakes keep coming back while thousands of new words wait behind them.

I want the Drillomator to do something else: keep exposing you to the wider language.

The goal is not to master every single word. It is to build a broad repertoire of Arabic.

It is perfectly fine to have gaps. It is perfectly fine to get words wrong. That is normal. Some words will come back. Some will not appear again for a while. Meanwhile, every day gives you another slice of the language.

The Verb Drill works differently, of course. If one particular verb annoys you, you can choose exactly that verb and train it on purpose.

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What is inside the machine?

The vocabulary side currently includes the

• Top 5,000 Words of Modern Standard Arabic
• Egyptian Arabic
• Levantine Arabic
• Media Arabic
• Synonyms
• Antonyms
• Qur’anic Arabic
• The 99 Names of Allah
• .. and several other collections coming soon.

Most of the material comes from my own vocabulary databases.

I started building them many years ago, back when I was doing the hard part of learning Arabic myself: collecting words, checking meanings, correcting forms, comparing entries and slowly turning piles of notes into something usable.

For the Drillomator, I went through the material again and polished and proofread it as carefully as I could. Taken together, the collections range roughly from beginner material into the B and C levels of the European framework.

There will still be mistakes. Arabic has an impressive ability to punish anyone who claims otherwise. If you spot one, please tell me.

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And the verbs?

For conjugation, I use an open-source self-hosted engine that I customized for the site. It works with a manually checked verb database and rules built around actual Arabic verbs rather than asking a language model to improvise a conjugation whenever somebody clicks a button.

The Drillomator uses this engine for its verb exercises.

+Plus subscribers can also use the conjugator itself directly at verbs.arabic.today. Sometimes you do not want a quiz. You just want to dissect a verb.

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Why most of it is for +Plus subscribers

I should explain this plainly.

AI snippets, search engines and ad blockers are making it harder to run an independent specialist website. More and more information gets consumed without anybody ever reaching the site that produced it, content is just being scraped, while maintaining the tools, databases and servers still takes time and costs money.

So I decided not to make the complete Drillomator free.

1. +Plus subscribers get all vocabulary databases, the Verb Drill, the Harakat Drill and the customization options. You can choose how much you want to train, focus on particular material, drill a specific verb, restrict verbs to certain stems or weak-letter patterns and generally make the machine as unpleasantly specific as your grammatical ambitions require.
2. Non-subscribers can use a smaller preview of some vocabulary drills. The full Verb Drill and Harakat Drill are part of +Plus.

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Put the Drillomator in your pocket

One small thing I added because I wanted it myself: you can put the Drillomator directly on your phone or computer.

On the Drillomator page, look for the Add Drillomator button. On supported browsers, it lets you add the Drillomator as a web app or shortcut. On an iPhone or iPad, it guides you through adding it to your Home Screen; on Android it can sit with your other apps; and on a desktop it can live in your Dock or app launcher.

After that, you just tap the Drillomator icon and go straight to the drills. No hunting through bookmarks, no typing the URL.

I quite like the idea of doing vocabulary questions while waiting for a train, sitting on the subway or standing in a queue somewhere. You do not need to turn every spare minute into a productivity project, of course. But if you suddenly feel the urge to conjugate a weak verb on public transport, the engine is ready.

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Now go and get something wrong

That is really the idea behind the Drillomator.

Not mastering every word. Not collecting points because you opened an app seven days in a row. Not pretending that getting something wrong means you failed.

Just Arabic, fresh material, repetition and an engine that keeps asking slightly inconvenient questions until more and more of the language starts to feel familiar.

I built it because I wanted exactly that kind of practice myself.

Now you can use it too.

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Drißner, G. (2026, September 6). I Built a Tool to Drill My Arabic. You Can Use It Too.. Arabic for Nerds. https://arabic-for-nerds.com/tools/drillomator/

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Published: September 6, 2026

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Publication ISSN: 3055-1730