Practise your recitation, word by word

Written by Alkhast Vatsaev · Updated 2026-08-14

Tilmidh (تلميذ, «student») is a free web trainer for people who already pray and want their recitation checked. The screen is a colored mushaf with phonetics under each word. You tap the verse, read aloud, and the microphone checks word by word. Nothing is installed, nothing is uploaded, and no account is needed.

Who this is for

It is built for someone who already prays and already knows the Arabic letters, but has never had their recitation corrected out loud. That describes most adults who learned to pray as children and never went further. If you cannot yet read the Arabic alphabet, this is the wrong tool for now: start with a proper alphabet course, then come back.

What it actually does

The screen shows the Uthmani text with tajweed colouring from Quran.com, cut word by word, with phonetics underneath. Speech recognition runs in your browser, and the trainer only advances when the consonantal skeleton of what you said matches the word on screen. If a word is not accepted, you repeat that word alone — not the whole verse. That single constraint is the point of the tool: it stops you from gliding past the word you always get wrong.

What it does not do

It does not measure the length of your madd, and it does not judge whether your emphatic letters are properly heavy. Those need a human ear. It does not grant an ijazah, it is not a scholarly certification, and it does not replace a teacher. Anyone selling you an app that claims otherwise is overselling what speech recognition can do today.

Where to start

Begin with Al-Fātiḥah, since you recite it in every rakʿa and any mistake there follows you through every prayer. Then move to the short suras you already know by heart — Al-Ikhlāṣ, Al-Falaq, An-Nās. Reciting from memory with the text in front of you is uncomfortable at first, and that discomfort is exactly where the value is: habit hides errors that have been repeated for years.

Once the short suras are steady, longer ones become the real training ground: Ayat al-Kursi for breath control on a single long verse, and Al-Mulk for holding a constant pace across thirty verses.

The rules, one at a time

Each tajweed rule has its own page with an example from a sura you already know and a direct link into the trainer: qalqalah, ghunnah, idghām, ikhfāʾ and madd. Working one rule across several suras beats reading all the rules at once and applying none.

Speech recognition works best in Chrome on Android and on desktop. It needs a quiet room and a normal reciting voice — not a whisper. If a word refuses to register after several honest attempts, the problem is usually the microphone or the noise around you, not your recitation.