Is Arabic Hard to Learn? Unveiling the Challenges and Rewards

Learning a new language is an enriching experience, opening doors to new cultures, perspectives, and opportunities. However, the path to fluency can be challenging, and the perceived difficulty of a language often deters potential learners. Arabic, with its distinct script, sounds, and grammar, is frequently labeled as a "hard" language for English speakers. But is this reputation justified? This article explores the challenges and rewards of learning Arabic, offering insights and practical advice for those considering embarking on this linguistic journey.

The Myth of the "Easy" Language

It’s important to remember that no language is “easy” to learn. Any language, even languages related to English, can take hundreds to thousands of hours of study to master. The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) categorizes languages based on the approximate time it takes for a native English speaker to achieve professional working proficiency. Arabic falls into Category IV, requiring approximately 2200 class hours. This classification reflects the significant differences between Arabic and English, which necessitate dedicated effort and time to overcome.

Decoding the Arabic Script

One of the most common concerns for people wanting to learn Arabic is that the script or alphabet looks insanely difficult. Squiggles and dots! It's intimidating for the uninitiated, no doubt about it. But let us assure you that the Arabic alphabet is surprisingly easy and straightforward. It really just takes a day or two to get your head around the fact that it's written right-to-left and the letters are connected (like cursive writing in English).

When it comes to languages that use the Roman alphabet, such as Spanish, Romanian, and even Turkish for reading, you don’t have to learn a new script to read. However, you will need to spend additional time learning the script in languages with their own scripts, like Arabic. Learning how to write can take a lot of time in some languages - those that use logograms like Chinese and those that use syllabaries like Malayalam have hundreds, or even thousands, of letter/character combinations.

Remember too: Arabic letters share the same ancient origin as our own alphabet - Phoenician. That's why letters like lam (ل) and sin (س) bear close resemblance to their English counterparts. Others are simply a matter of remembering dot placement.

Here’s a key question, though: Is knowing how to write the Arabic script the same as knowing how to read Arabic? Unfortunately, it is not. Reading Arabic - being literate in the language - means understanding what the script is trying to convey. Reading and writing Arabic aren’t standalone skills. They’re a subset of the entire Arabic language learning experience. How does this relate to reading and writing Arabic? Conversational fluency - building a vocabulary and being able to put words and phrases together - is an essential skill when trying to understand written material. Building a basic Arabic vocabulary is a great way to get a head start before the program. You can do this by using flashcards, too. Study 5-10 new words every day or more if you’re up for it.

Mastering the Arabic Alphabet: A Practical Approach

It’s a great idea first to teach yourself how to read the Arabic script before you embark on your language-learning journey. Flashcards can help you easily master the Arabic script in a week or less. Create a deck of flashcards with each letter of the Arabic alphabet - from Alif (ا) all the way to Ya (ي). Try to learn how to write five letters every day, then revise your flashcards to make sure you know them. Just read the content out loud. If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve overcome a major hurdle to learning Arabic. Knowing how to read the script means that material written in Arabic is now accessible to you.

The Absence of Vowels: A Unique Challenge

The only somewhat challenging aspect that can't be argued is the absence of vowels: Arabic is what's known as an abjad (a - b - j - d are the first letters of the Arabic alphabet). An abjad is a writing system where each letter is a consonant but the vowel markings are left out, leaving you the reader, to assume where they belong. This means that a word like kalb (dog) is written: k - l - b. It's up to you to know where the vowel belongs.

Although there is no shortcut here, over time you start to recognize patterns in writing and can make accurate guesses on most words. It's also worth noting that even in English, many words such as through and receipt are not pronounced as they're written either. You only know their pronunciation through exposure and practice. Same goes with Arabic.

Navigating the Sounds of Arabic

Another factor that makes Arabic hard is that it uses some sounds that are new to English speakers. This happens with almost any new language you want to learn (think about the “r” in French) but even more so in Arabic. The letter ” ق” , for example, sounds like a “k” but is pronounced farther back in the throat. In Arabic, as in Hebrew, people don’t include most vowels when writing. Maktab, or “office,” is just written mktb. Vowels are included as little marks above and below in beginning textbooks, but you soon have to get used to doing without them. Whn y knw th lngg wll ths s nt tht hrd.

Read also: The Rewards of Studying Russian

I do not recommend chewing gum in Arabic class, because a host of noises articulated in the back of the throat makes it likely that the gum will end up in your lungs. Arabic has one “h” akin to ours, and another that has been described as the sound you would make trying to blow out a candle with air from your throat. The sounds are tough, but the words are tougher.

Unraveling Arabic Grammar

For starters, Arabic grammar is quite different from English grammar. While in English, gender does not modify verb form (we say, “she thinks,” and he thinks”), Arabic has different verb forms depending on whether it’s a man or a woman performing the action. Arabic is a VSO language, which means the verb usually comes before the subject and object. It has a dual number, so nouns and verbs must be learned in singular, dual, and plural. A present-tense verb has 13 forms. There are three noun cases and two genders. Some European languages have just as many forms to keep track of, but in Arabic the idiosyncrasies can be mind-boggling. When Karam explains that numbers are marked for gender-but most numbers take the opposite gender from the word they are modifying-we students stare at each other in slack-jawed solidarity. When we learn that adjectives modifying nonhuman plurals always have a feminine singular form-meaning that “the cars are new” comes out as “the cars, she are new”-I can hear heads banging on the desks around me.

Arabic Grammar: Simpler Than You Think?

Arabic grammar is incredibly simple. Especially when you compare it to languages like Russian and German. Admittedly, your learning style and choice of dialect make a big difference here (e.g. learning MSA with a traditional grammar-translation approach vs. learning a spoken dialect through a communicative method) but either way, the grammar is remarkably simple.

Here's a brief list of some of the most important examples (in no particular order):

Unlike German and Greek, there’s no neuter gender.
The verb ‘to be‘ is omitted in the present tense (so "she is beautiful" is simply "she beautiful").
In the North African dialects (Maghrebi, Egyptian), negation is similar to the way it’s done in French with a prefix and suffix (ne --- pas - e.g. je ne viens pas) using ma --- sh. To say something like ‘he spoke’ (kalim) negated would be ‘He didn’t speak’ - ma-kalim-sh).
Noun possession and direct objects are super easy. You just have to learn a few suffixes. (-ak = you (m.) so kitab-ak (your book) and ba7eb-ak (I love you).
Arabic verb forms follow a very consistent and easy-to-learn pattern. You can either memorize these individually or just learn them in context through exposure (recommended). For example, if you look at the stem 3-L-M - (اعلم) it means 'to teach' while (اتعلم) means 'to learn'). See the note on stems above.
The definite article (ال) is indeclinable. This means that it can be applied to masculine or feminine nouns and doesn't change for different cases.

As you can see, compared to many other languages, Arabic is grammatically simple and straightforward.

Read also: Learning the Hard Way: An Overview

Roots: A Key to Unlocking Vocabulary

One of the defining aspects of languages like Arabic (and other Semitic languages) is that most of its vocab can be derived from 3-letter roots/stems. There are some 2 and 4 letter stems too but most have 3. This makes learning Arabic vocabulary a cinch! 🙂

So let's give you an example. Take the stem K(ك)-T(ت)-B(ب). This 3-letter stem makes up Arabic words related somehow to writing and from it, you can derive all sorts of related vocab. Here:

كتب kataba - he wrote
مكتب maktab - office
كاتب kaatib - writer
كتاب kitaab - book

All those words are semantically related and contain the same stem. Just in a different configuration. By comparison, if you look at the English words of the same meaning, they don't use the same root letters and bear no resemblance. This means that over time as you get better at Arabic, you'll be able to take accurate guesses at meaning of various words if you know its stem.

Another good example is the stem: F-T-H (فتح) means “to open”. By putting the letter mim (M) at the beginning of the word and including a long vowel on its last syllable, it becomes instrumental. مفتاح And we know that a key is instrumental for opening things. This is why Arabic roots make learning vocabulary so fun and much simpler than other languages.

Modern Standard Arabic vs. Dialects: A Crucial Decision

The State Department reckons that it takes 80 to 88 weeks (roughly a year in the classroom full-time and a year in-country) to get to a level 3 on a 5-point scale in Modern Standard Arabic, the language I am learning. But there’s a twist. MSA has about the same role in the Arab world that Latin had in medieval Europe: It’s the language of writing, religion, and formal speeches, but it is no one’s native spoken language any more. Arabic has long since become a series of “dialects,” which are actually more like separate languages, as many varieties are mutually incomprehensible. Arabic spoken in Morocco is as different from Arabic spoken in Egypt and from Modern Standard as French is from Spanish and Latin. When Arabs from different regions talk to each other, they improvise a mix of Egyptian Arabic (which is understood widely because of Egypt’s movie industry), Modern Standard, and a bit of their own dialects. So, if I go to Egypt or Lebanon in a year, having managed to get some near grip on my classroom language, I will be walking down the street asking people for a bite to eat in something that will sound almost as conversationally inappropriate to them as Shakespearean English would to us. Most literate Arabs know the Modern Standard from schooling, newspapers, television, sermons, and the like, though, so hopefully they will not laugh too hard as they help me out and respond in something I can almost understand. And that is if I work my tail off for the next year.

That’s because what we call a “language” is often actually a blanket term for a whole group of related dialects. Sometimes these dialects are very close; for example, speakers of Australian English can generally understand speakers of American English with only a little difficulty. But dialects can also be very distant. This is the case in the Arabic-speaking world. So which dialect should someone study? This is a dilemma that makes it hard to even start learning the language. Many Arabic programs (especially in the United States) have their students start out with Modern Standard Arabic. This is the variety we’ve decided to teach as well. Specifically, we’re teaching a less-formal, spoken version of Modern Standard Arabic - not the version that would appear in poetry or formal news broadcasts, but instead the version that would be used once a newscaster stopped reading from their script and started talking to their interviewee.

Before we start anything, we need to stop and reflect on why we are doing it. What is it that motivates us? What do we want to gain? This is important because it will subjectively make learning Arabic easier or more difficult. If we want to understand the Quran and, after six months of studying, we have only learnt directions, different food types and how to go to the doctor, and we don’t know basic Quranic vocabulary, we will feel frustrated. This is perhaps one of the things that makes it very difficult to start learning Arabic, that we did not set the right intention and goals to start with. You have to research what is the best course for you. You have to gather information before embarking on it and be clear about your intention to your teachers. They will be the best people to help you and guide you through the process. Listen to them. In many cases, they have dedicated their lives to teaching Arabic and have had many different students. What is really important is that you choose the course and the teachers most appropriate for your goal. Learning a language has different skills: speaking, understanding, reading and writing. The approach that we recommend is that you dedicate some time to each skill because one will reinforce the other. It is advisable that you set short, medium and long-term milestones. For example, in the short term, you might want to be able to understand first-hand a short Hadith or an Ayah of the Quran, or perhaps greet family and friends in their language. In the medium term you might want to understand a Khutba or a longer chapter of the Quran, and perhaps have a short conversation with a friend.

If you are new to Arabic, you might think that there’s only one Arabic language, like there is only one English (though this is also subject to discussion). And, in a theoretical sense, that might be true. There is classical Arabic, the Arabic of the Quran, the Ahadith and much of the classical literature. This is what is generally known as fusha. Then we have the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which is a modernised version of classical Arabic. And then we have the different dialects. Generally, each region has one. All of those different variations of Arabic are alive and functional. Classical Arabic is generally used in religious and academic settings. Though generally, people understand it, they do not necessarily speak it well. The MSA is used in formal current settings, like universities, broadcasters or newspapers. The dialects, on the other hand, are what people speak in their day to day. We go back to point one, what is your intention for learning Arabic? If your primary intention is to understand the Noble Quran, the Ahadith and the classical literature, then you should focus on classical Arabic or fusha. And you do not need to travel to an Arabic-speaking country for that. In fact, if you travel at the beginning of your journey to learn Arabic, it might be counterproductive. If you decide to travel to an Arabic-speaking country to study classical Arabic, it might be wise to already have a foundation before doing it. If your intention is to study at university, work or conduct businesses in Arabic-speaking countries, then learning modern standard Arabic might be wise. Once again, you might want to start learning MSA before you actually go, for it’s perfectly possible to have a decent level of MSA without having set a foot in an Arabic-speaking country. Finally, if you want to learn a particular dialect, we recommend that you first have a strong MSA foundation. That is because all dialects derive and borrow their grammar from it. Of course, it is possible to also learn a particular dialect before you go, but since dialects are mostly spoken, what you really want is to be in a situation where you are forced to speak and communicate.

The Rewards of Learning Arabic

Even though Arabic may be harder to learn than other languages, it does not mean it’s not worth your time and effort. For the reasons listed above, among others, Arabic is a challenging language to learn. But a harder language is not an unlearnable language. First, Arabic vocabulary might not be as difficult for an English speaker as you’d think - English and Arabic actually share some vocabulary. For example, words for many delightful things (like coffee and sugar and oranges and limes) have been borrowed from Arabic. And second, while Arabic grammar isn’t simple, a well-designed course guides learners carefully through the trickier parts of the language. A guitarist will need time to learn to play the drums well. But the guitarist can learn. And at the end of the day, the guitarist, by learning the drums, will discover all sorts of new things. They’ll sharpen their sense of time and rhythm, for example. Arabic is the same way. The path of learning Arabic won’t be easy or quick. But by learning it, you’ll challenge yourself, sharpen your mind and your language-learning skills, and perhaps learn something about the language you yourself speak. And you’ll be opening up opportunities, as well: you might find yourself, down the road, with the opportunity to speak with some of the 300 million people who claim this language as their own. Or you might get to travel to one of the 25 countries where Arabic is spoken, or you might discover the beauty of classical Arabic poetry. Or you might even just get the opportunity to greet your neighbor in her native language, and perhaps make her feel just a bit more welcome. So the question isn’t whether or not it’s worth it to learn Arabic.

You already have a head start learning Arabic! Finally, you'll find that colloquial Arabic dialects borrow a LOT of foreign vocabulary and expressions. Especially English and French. French is particularly influential in the Maghrib (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia). In other dialects like Egyptian and Levantine, you'll find that native speakers frequently codeswitch and use English expressions (this is becoming more and more prevalent due to social media). Some terms are borrowed and still considered "foreign" while others have now become part of the local language. You can find a list of loanwords here.

Arabic is without doubt one of the easiest languages to find conversation partners Arabic is one of the easiest languages on earth in our opinion to find opportunities to practice. Arabs aren't shy! 🙂 You'll never have trouble finding willing conversation partners with Arabic as Arabic-speaking people are - generally speaking - very warm and welcoming. Compare this to many other cultures around the world where shyness and/or reservedness tend to make it harder to approach strangers to practice. Can't travel just yet? We recommend italki for Arabic practice (many of our own teachers and contributors also offer conversation lessons there). Not a member of TalkInArabic.com yet?

Tips and Tricks for a Successful Journey

Everyone learns languages differently. Some people seem to pick up the new vocabulary and grammar without any problems. There are several elements of language learning that can be challenging for anyone. Online Arabic classes have made it more convenient than ever to study a new language and to go at your own pace. If you require more time to really grasp the new elements of the language, you’re free to do that, too. Each and every one of those accomplishments feels great. It encourages learners to continue working and striving to learn and speak a little more.

If you speak English, you might consider that languages like French, Spanish or Italian are relatively similar. They are all ball and racquet sports. But if you speak English natively and want to learn Arabic, Chinese or Korean, it might seem more difficult, because they have different tools and skills. However, all sports share similarities: they require physical effort, they train our coordination, they make us fitter and healthier or they train us to work with others. If we keep that in mind, learning a new language-any language-becomes easier. We need to keep in mind that what we want is to communicate and understand others.

For someone who speaks Urdu, on the other hand, Arabic might seem easier because they share the same alphabet (with slight variations), they have relatively similar grammar and share a lot of vocabulary. We learn our native language organically as we grow and develop. Psychologists say that babies are world language speakers when they are born. What happens, according to psychologists, is that babies when they are born can hear and differentiate all the subtilities of letter pronunciation, intonation, rhythm, etc. of all languages. For example, for an English speaker, it’s difficult to differentiate between ÿ≠ ÿÆ Ÿá because the three of them are equal to the phoneme ‘kh’. The process of differentiating and hearing the subtilities of all languages end when the baby is about 9 months old. But fortunately, although you might not have a native accent, you can master a language even better than native speakers. The secret is to immerse yourself in the language. At first, you might feel shy to speak with other people, and that’s normal. Even if you do not understand it, your brain is picking it up. Just as it happens with children. They might not understand what they are hearing. As you develop your skills and vocabulary, try also to speak with other people. If they are native speakers, even better. Don’t be shy. Remember, practice makes perfect. And your brain is really, really powerful. What matters is consistency. Fifteen minutes every day is better than two hours once a week.

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