A study app for spoken Palestinian Arabic and Modern Hebrew — the way people actually talk, not the written standard.
Alefya teaches two languages side by side: spoken Palestinian Arabic — the urban Levantine of Jerusalem, Ramallah and Nablus — and Modern Hebrew. It runs entirely in your browser and can be installed to a phone's home screen.
It carries graded readers, short stories, a daily news edition written fresh each morning, verb conjugation tables, a dictionary where every word on screen is tappable, scripture in parallel columns, and a study plan that adapts to how much time you actually have.
Alef is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet; ya is the last of the Arabic. The name spans both, end to end. Yah is also a Hebrew name for God, and ʿaafiya is the everyday Palestinian blessing — what you say over someone's food, or their new haircut.
Alefya is built and maintained by Alex Branum, working alone. It is not a company. There are no investors, no advertising, and nothing on this site is sold to a third party.
Signing in is optional and exists for one reason: so your flashcards, study plan and reading progress follow you from your phone to your computer. Signed out, everything works and stays on that one device. See the privacy page for exactly what is stored and where.
The app also has two places where you can paste an API key of your own — one for Anthropic (to ask a tutor questions) and one for Crossway (to show the ESV alongside the Arabic Bible). Both are optional, both stay in your own browser, and both are sent only to the company that issued them. Neither is stored on any server of ours. Details are on the privacy page.
Word data is looked up, not invented: Palestinian Arabic from the Maknuune lexicon (CC BY-SA 4.0) and Hebrew from Wiktionary via kaikki.org (CC BY-SA 4.0). Scripture is public domain — the Van Dyck Arabic Bible, the Westminster Leningrad Codex and Delitzsch's Hebrew New Testament. Full attribution ships with the app.
The sentences around that data — the dialogues, the graded stories, the podcast scripts, the daily news and the teaching prose — are written for this app with the help of a language model and have not been reviewed by a native speaker. Every voice you hear is synthesized rather than recorded: the podcast hosts are not people. Answers from Ask a Tutor are generated and can be wrong. Read and listen for practice; don't memorize a phrasing as gospel, and when something matters, ask a person.
This is said here and in the Terms of use rather than repeated on every screen in the app. Anything lifted verbatim from a published edition — scripture, liturgy — is still credited where it appears, because its licence requires it.
support@alefya.me — a real person reads it.