Duolingo English Test for Arabic Speakers: Mistakes and Fixes

Why Arabic speakers lose marks in predictable places

Arabic and English are not close languages. Arabic has a definite article (al-) but no indefinite one; Arabic has three long vowels and three short ones where English has around twelve vowel sounds; Arabic has no /p/, no /v/ and no hard /g/ in Modern Standard; and Arabic sentences happily run on with wa (and) for half a paragraph, which is good style in Arabic and bad style in English.

The DET grades machine-readable features of your English: the range and accuracy of your grammar, the range of your vocabulary, how intelligible your speech is, how well you develop an idea. Small, systematic errors therefore hurt more than one dramatic mistake – if you drop the article in front of every noun, the grader sees that pattern in every task you produce, and it drags Literacy and Production down together. The good news is the reverse: fixing one habit lifts several question types at once.

Mistake 1: articles – a, an, the (and the missing one)

The single most common error we correct. Arabic marks definiteness with al- but has no word for a/an, so Arabic speakers either delete the indefinite article (“I am engineer”) or over-apply the to general nouns (“The education is important”). Use this check on every noun you write:

Drill: underline every singular countable noun in five of your old answers and check each against the table. Jobs are the classic trap: I am an engineer, She is a doctor.

Mistake 2: p and b – the sound that does not exist in Arabic

Modern Standard Arabic has no /p/, so park becomes bark, people becomes beoble, and problem becomes broblem. In Read Aloud and in the Speaking tasks this directly reduces intelligibility, which is what the Conversation and Production subscores measure.

The physical difference is tiny: /p/ and /b/ use exactly the same lips. /p/ is voiceless with a puff of air; /b/ is voiced with no puff. Hold a thin sheet of paper 5 cm from your mouth: it should flutter on pen and stay still on Ben.

Train with minimal pairs, ten repetitions each, recorded and played back: pen/Ben, pig/big, pack/back, pull/bull, cap/cab, rope/robe, park/bark, pear/bear, pin/bin. Then read this sentence until it is clean: “The public park was a popular place, but people brought big bags of paper.” The same drill fixes /v/ (fery for very – top teeth on the lower lip, add voice).

Mistake 3: vowels – ship/sheep, bad/bed, full/fool

Arabic has a small vowel inventory, so English short vowels get pulled towards the nearest Arabic sound and ship/sheep, bad/bed, full/fool, cat/cut all come out the same. In Listen and Type that also means you hear them the same and type the wrong word.

Drill: record yourself saying all four pairs, then listen without looking. If you cannot tell which is which from your own recording, the grader cannot either. Ten minutes a day for a week is usually enough to separate them.

Mistake 4: run-on sentences and the ‘and’ habit

In Arabic, chaining clauses with wa is normal and elegant. In English it reads as a beginner sentence and caps your Literacy score, because the grader wants a range of structures.

Typical DET answer: “I think the technology is very useful and it helps students to learn and also it makes the communication easy and it saves the time.” Four ideas, one sentence, no variety. The fix is a rhythm, not a rule – in a 120-word answer aim for this mix:

• One short sentence (5-9 words) to state the point.
• One medium sentence (12-18 words) with because, although, which or while.
• One example sentence starting with For example or In my case.
• One closing sentence (8-12 words).

Rewritten: “Technology has changed how students study. It saves time, because research that once took a week now takes an hour. For example, I finished my final project using online journals only. Overall, the benefits are much larger than the risks.” Same ideas, four sentences, three structures.

Mistake 5: spelling – the Read and Complete and Listen and Type killers

Arabic is written without short vowels, so Arabic speakers systematically under-type English vowels and double letters. The words that cost most marks in Read and Complete and Listen and Type are almost always the same ones.

Decide once whether you write British or American spelling and stay consistent (organise/organize, centre/center). Both are accepted; mixing them inside one answer looks careless.

Drill: type your 30 worst words five times each in a real text box – not on paper. Your fingers need the practice. More traps in DET common mistakes.

Mistake 6: pacing in Read Aloud

Read Aloud gives you a short sentence and about 20 seconds. Arabic speakers either rush, swallowing the ends of words, or stop dead at an unfamiliar word and lose the recording. Three rules fix almost every Read Aloud:

• Read the whole sentence with your eyes first, in the preparation moment, so no word surprises you mid-recording.
• Speak slightly slower than feels natural – roughly 120-140 words per minute. Clarity scores; speed does not.
• Never stop and never restart. If you mispronounce a word, keep going. A fluent recording with one wrong word scores far better than a broken recording with none.

Two Arabic-specific details: pronounce final consonant clusters fully (asked, texts, helped), which Arabic tends to break with a vowel; and keep English word stress (PHO-to-graph but pho-TOG-ra-pher).

Mistake 7: translating from Arabic in your head

Word-for-word translation produces sentences that are grammatical in Arabic and wrong in English. The recurring ones:

• “I have 25 years” → I am 25 years old
• “Depends on my opinion” → in my opinion
• “He explained me the lesson” → he explained the lesson to me
• “Since two years” → for two years
• “I am agree” → I agree

The cure is chunking: learn phrases, not words. Store in my opinion, as a result, on the other hand as single units. Forty to fifty such chunks carry every Writing and Speaking task in the test.

Mistake 8: answering the topic instead of the question

This one is not about grammar at all, and it is the most expensive mistake on the list because a well-written answer to the wrong question scores badly however clean the English is.

It shows up in three places:

• Summarize the Conversation. Arabic speakers often describe what the conversation was about (“They talked about the university”) instead of reporting what was actually said (“She asked whether the deadline had moved, and he confirmed it had been pushed to Friday”). Name the speakers, report the specific content.
• Speak About the Photo. Listing objects (“There is a man, there is a table”) instead of describing a situation and adding an inference. Describe, then interpret: what is happening, and why you think so.
• Interactive Writing. The second part asks you to develop your first answer with detail, not to repeat it in different words. Add a concrete example, a reason and a consequence.

Drill: before you write or speak, say the question back to yourself in one clause. If your answer does not match that clause, you are answering the topic.

One more thing worth checking before you book anything: the DET is accepted by 6,000+ institutions, but it is not accepted for the Australian subclass 500 visa, and it is not a UKVI SELT. See universities accepting the DET.

A one-week fix plan

If you would rather not diagnose yourself, that is what our DET course does: live online with certified instructors, with your Speaking and Writing corrected personally. If your test is in days, the intensive course covers the same material at a faster pace, and the private 1-on-1 course follows your schedule.