About Hakawi
Hakawi is an AI Arabic tutor built by a parent who needed it first.
Why Hakawi exists
Hakawi's founder, Sharene Lee, lives in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, with her seven children, five of whom are still in K-12. Her family has homeschooled and used online schools over the years, and Arabic fluency has always been a goal: they are Muslims living in the Gulf. But she is not proficient in Arabic herself, so she has never been able to teach it to her kids.
Last year the family enrolled the younger children in an Arabic-medium school. They weren't only learning Arabic. They were meeting math, science, and other subjects for the first time, in a language they struggled with. Sharene found herself sitting beside them, translating each Arabic word and sentence, even as she was trying to explain probability. She couldn't help her middle and high schoolers at all.
Hakawi is what she built in response: an AI tutor that teaches instead of giving answers.
What Hakawi is
Hakawi is a tutor, not a course. It doesn't teach Arabic as its own subject and it doesn't replace the class, the curriculum, or the book. It works from whatever real Arabic material a student is already assigned, such as a school textbook page, a homeschool curriculum, or a Qur'an, hadith, or classical-text passage. It reads the passage aloud, translates it into English, and quizzes the student with guiding questions before it gives away an answer.
Its defining trait is patience. A student can ask the same question again and again and get a genuinely different explanation and example each time, at whatever pace it takes.
What Hakawi is not
- Hakawi is AI, and says so. It is not a human tutor.
- It focuses on reading and understanding first, writing second. It does very little for spoken Arabic or pronunciation today, so it is not a conversational-fluency app.
- It is not a replacement for a teacher or a school. It is homework support for the material a student already has to get through.
- It is in early access and invite-only. There is no self-serve signup yet.
The person behind it
Sharene is a tech founder who has built two startups. Hakawi is a labor of love. You can reach the team at hello@hakawitutor.com.
To see how it works in practice, read How Hakawi works, or browse the Hakawi blog.