Yamama يمامة
Ask your class a question and watch the answers arrive on your screen, one student at a time, as they happen.
Students need no account, no app and no password. You put a short code on the board, they scan it or type it, and they are in.
Why Arabic
Arabic is one of the most widely spoken languages on earth, and one of the least widely taught relative to that reach. It is a working language of the United Nations, the official language of more than twenty countries, and the liturgical language of Islam — read daily by far more people than speak it as a mother tongue.
A few things worth knowing
Words are built from roots
Most Arabic words grow from a three-consonant root. From ك ت ب (k-t-b, “writing”) come كَتَبَ (he wrote), كِتاب (book), مَكتَب (desk, office) and كاتِب (writer). Learn the root and a whole family of words opens at once.
You already speak some
English borrowed heavily from Arabic, often through Spanish and Latin: algebra, algorithm, alcohol, cotton, sugar, coffee, lemon, admiral and zero all trace back to Arabic.
The script travels
The Arabic script is used far beyond Arabic itself — Persian, Dari, Urdu, Pashto and Kurdish Sorani are all written in adapted forms of it. Learning the letters opens more than one door.
Two registers, one language
Formal Modern Standard Arabic is shared across the Arab world in writing, news and education, while each region speaks its own variety at home. Learners usually meet both, and it helps to know which one a lesson is teaching.
Built for a mixed classroom
Students answer in their own language. The student side is translated into ten — English, Arabic, Dari, Farsi, Spanish, Somali, Portuguese, Turkish and both Kurdish variants — and lays out right to left where the script needs it. A question written in Arabic and a question written in English can sit in the same quiz.
Named for the dove — يمامة — which carries a message and comes back.