Arabic — Exams
Examiners can hear the moment your fusha turns into dialect.
An Arabic oral is sat in the variety you have read for years and spoken for minutes. Under a clock, on a question nobody warned you about, it is the case ending and the number agreement that go first — and those are precisely what the rater is listening for.
Rehearse the formats the way they actually arrive.
When the tester changes gear
The OPI moves with your answers, so the follow-up lands on the thing you just said, often in a tense you were steering around. Practise being asked to justify a sentence you threw away.
The OPIc replay window
The OPIc gives you a prompt and records whatever follows. The replay is claimed in the five seconds after the prompt ends or not at all. Practise finishing a fusha sentence into silence.
Three tasks, eleven minutes
The CIMA oral opens with a guided interview and closes with a monologue, neither of them prepared. Practise moving from a standing start on a subject the examiner chose, in fusha, and getting to a second and third sentence without stalling.
The simulated dialogue
Hamza asks you to play a role — booking, complaining, explaining — after a short preparation window. The switch from planning to speaking is the hard part, because the preparation is short enough that most of it goes on the first sentence.
Holding a register
Examiners hear it when you slide into dialect halfway through a fusha answer, and when your fusha is so stiff it stops sounding like speech. Practise staying in one register for two minutes together.
You get the sentence back with the ending you dropped marked on it.
Each session ends with a score and a list: which endings went missing, which numbers came out with the gender reversed, where the register gave way. Anything that keeps recurring is put in front of you again next time.
- Case endings in formal speech: where you dropped a required ending, where you added one that does not belong.
- Ayn against hamza, the emphatics against their plain pairs, the gemination you left out — each one a different word.
- The number and the noun: the gender reversal from three to ten, the accusative singular from eleven upwards, and the price or date you were saying when it went wrong.
- Broken plurals you produced by guessing, and the ones you avoided by rewording the sentence around them.
- Negation: lam with the jussive, lan with the subjunctive, laysa in a nominal sentence, chosen at speed.
- The exact sentence where fusha gave way to dialect, or where dialect gave way to recitation.
Start with ten minutes
Nothing to book, and a written report at the end of the first session.
Try 10 minutes freeWhose score this is
The score a session gives you is ours alone. It is not ACTFL's, not the Institut du monde arabe's, not Qiyas's, and nobody can turn it into a result. Specifications and fees also move: ACTFL, the Institut du monde arabe, Qiyas and Arab Academy each publish the current one, and those pages are the only reliable source. Everything here happens beforehand, in private, where a bad answer costs nothing.