Is Arabic Hard to Learn? Here Is What Was Actually Hard

Yes, but not evenly. The Arabic script is the part beginners fear and the part that ends soonest. Verb forms, listening, and the split between Modern Standard Arabic and the spoken dialects are what take years. I learned Arabic as an adult, and this is the rating skill by skill.

I started again from zero in 2014 with one goal: to read and understand the Quran. For over a year I had a lesson every weekday over Skype with a family member trained at an institution in France. Everything below is what that run cost. The full account of how I learned Arabic has the whole route, book by book.

One transliteration scheme is used throughout this page: ʿ for ع, ʾ for hamza, a dot under ḥ ṣ ḍ ṭ ẓ for the emphatic letters, and long vowels written ā ī ū.

Arabic difficulty, rated skill by skill

Arabic is not one difficulty. It is about ten separate difficulties with very different costs. Two of them are finished within weeks, and two of them are still going for me. Rating the whole language as one number is what makes most answers to this question useless. Here is each piece rated out of 5 from my own run at it.

The pronunciation row comes with a warning: I had an unfair advantage. At the age of six I spent a year in an Arabic-speaking country, and although my vocabulary stayed frozen at a six-year-old level, the throat sounds stayed with me. If you are meeting ع and ح for the first time as an adult, rate that row a 4.

The Arabic script is the part that ends soonest

The Arabic alphabet is 28 letters, and it is the smallest of the ten obstacles in the table above. Each letter takes up to four shapes depending on where it sits in the word, but the shapes are variations of one skeleton, and most letters differ from a neighbour only by the number of dots.

The letters are not what keeps reading hard for months. Short vowels are usually left out of ordinary printed Arabic, so a reader has to supply them from knowledge of the word. The Quran and children's books are fully marked. That is the reason a beginner who starts with the Quran reads sooner than one who starts with a newspaper. It is also the reason my first page of the Quran took 20 minutes and a page eventually took 2, while the letters themselves never changed.

Work from a chart of the forms rather than a list of names. Our Arabic alphabet chart with all four positional forms shows every letter isolated, initial, medial and final, and our Arabic alphabet books and workbooks covers what to drill them with.

Pronunciation: about six sounds do most of the damage

Most Arabic sounds already exist in English. The trouble comes from a small set that does not: ع (ʿayn), ح (ḥāʾ), خ (khāʾ), غ (ghayn), ق (qāf), and the emphatic group ص ض ط ظ taken together.

These are not decoration. They change meaning. قَلْب (qalb) is heart and كَلْب (kalb) is dog, and the only difference is whether the first sound is made at the back of the throat or at the roof of the mouth. Get it wrong in a sentence about your feelings and the sentence is about a dog.

This is where self-study falls down, because you cannot hear your own error. A book that teaches the letters through their pronunciation, recited by someone who can correct you, beats an app. That is what Al-Qaidah An-Noraniah is built for.

Vocabulary is where the hours go

Vocabulary is the single largest time cost for an English speaker, because there is no free ride. French gives you thousands of words you already half know. Arabic gives you about a dozen that travelled the other way, like coffee and algebra. Every other word is new.

You get the root system in return. Most Arabic words are built from three consonants that carry a core meaning, and the patterns laid over those consonants are predictable. Learn one root and you have partly learned a family:

Every word in that table is the three letters ك ت ب with a different pattern around them. Once you see the skeleton under a word, you can often guess a meaning nobody taught you, and a dictionary lookup becomes a deduction. The payoff arrives late, though. That is why the vocabulary row is a 4 and not a 5. I used spaced repetition from the first week and still do: Anki every day, for letters first, then words, then grammar rules.

Verb forms are the genuinely hard part

Of everything in Arabic, the verb system is the part that most deserves the language's reputation. Arabic derives up to ten patterns from a root in common use, numbered I to X, each with its own meaning shift, vowel pattern, and set of nouns and participles. Forms XI to XV exist and most can be safely ignored.

Ten patterns times past, present, subjunctive, jussive (the mood used after certain particles and in commands) and imperative, times the person endings, is a lot of shapes for one idea. Recognising them while reading came reasonably quickly. Producing the right one while speaking is the part that still slows me down.

A dense book got me through it. A New Arabic Grammar is heavy going and it is one of the best books available for this. The method was mechanical: review the vocabulary two chapters ahead, learn the chapter in the lesson, complete every problem in the book, then have the problems reviewed in the next lesson. Nothing clever, done every weekday. Our Arabic grammar book recommendations lists the alternatives and what each is good for.

Modern Standard Arabic and the dialects: the split that doubles the work

This is the part most difficulty articles leave out, and it costs the most. Modern Standard Arabic is what books, news, official writing and the Quran use. It is nobody's home language. A Moroccan and an Iraqi both learn it at school and neither speaks it at dinner.

So a learner who wants to read and to talk is learning two overlapping things. The grammar carries over and much of the vocabulary carries over. The pronunciation and the everyday words do not. My own route went through Modern Standard Arabic because the goal was a text, and for years my only dialect exposure came from the listening sections of a textbook.

Choose deliberately instead of drifting. Reading goal, start with Modern Standard Arabic. Conversation goal, pick one dialect and commit to it. Our guide to the Arabic dialects and where each is spoken covers what you are choosing between, before you spend a year on the wrong one.

Listening was the skill I got wrong

For me the hardest thing about Arabic was the order I did things in, not any feature of the language. I spent the grammar years reading, translating and drilling, and became very well versed in grammar rules and in moving between Arabic and English. I did almost no listening or speaking in that time, and I regret it.

Al Arabiyyah Bayna Yadayk fixed it. The book opens every chapter with a conversation and then works through vocabulary, sentence formation and comprehension. My speaking and listening improved sharply once that became the daily material. If I taught from A New Arabic Grammar I would attach an oral report in Arabic to every chapter, because the book will not force you to speak and you will not do it voluntarily. Whatever skill you are avoiding is the one holding your level down.

How many hours the published estimates say Arabic takes

The number everyone quotes is not ours and should be labelled as what it is. The US Foreign Service Institute classifies Arabic as a Category IV language, its most difficult group, and estimates roughly 2,200 class hours to reach professional working proficiency. That figure describes full-time students in small classes with trained instructors.

It is a poor predictor for a self-studier, in both directions. You will not get 25 focused hours a week, so the calendar stretches. You are also not chasing a diplomat's proficiency, so a narrower goal such as reading a vowelled text arrives far sooner. We break the real timeline down in how long it takes to learn Arabic.

The mistakes that make Arabic harder than it is

• Starting with no plan. I failed at Arabic several times before 2014, always for the same reason: no idea what to do next. The resources I turned up by searching were terrible, and I had no way to tell.
• Postponing listening. Grammar without audio builds a reader who cannot hold a conversation, and I was that reader for years.
• Leaving pronunciation to fix later. Later means never. Sounds set early, and re-teaching your mouth is harder than teaching it.
• Trusting one course to be the whole package. My university certificate was four online courses built on the Al-Kitaab series, and I found the course quite lacking. It cut grammar explanation to buy time for listening and speaking, and taught a few bad habits doing it. Most of my classmates were quietly using other grammar books to fill the gap.

Where to start if the answer is still yes

Arabic is hard in a way that rewards a plan. The rules are strict, the exceptions are few, and the order you take the ten difficulties in matters more than the material. Pick a goal narrow enough to finish, learn the letters and their sounds with someone who can correct you, and read vowelled text daily with a timer running. Then put listening in from week one instead of week one hundred. Our guide on how to start learning Arabic sets out that sequence, and the best way to learn Arabic names the specific books, tutors and apps we recommend and the ones we do not.

Frequently asked questions

Is Arabic the hardest language for English speakers?

The US Foreign Service Institute puts Arabic in Category IV, its hardest group, alongside Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean, and estimates roughly 2200 class hours to reach professional working proficiency. Within that group Japanese is usually singled out as harder still because of its writing system. So Arabic is in the hardest tier, but it is not alone there and it is not the worst case in it.

How long does it take to learn the Arabic alphabet?

Weeks, not months, if you drill it daily. The alphabet was the first thing my tutor and I worked on, from Al-Qaidah An-Noraniah, and it was finished before we started reading. What takes much longer is reading at speed. My first page of the Quran took 20 minutes. The same length of page eventually took 2 minutes.

Is Arabic grammar hard?

Arabic grammar is heavy but unusually regular, which makes it learnable in a way that irregular grammars are not. The rules are strict and the exceptions are few. I worked through A New Arabic Grammar, which is very dense and one of the best books for this, doing every exercise in it. The hard part is not understanding a rule. It is producing it at conversational speed.

Do I have to learn both Modern Standard Arabic and a dialect?

If you want to read and to talk to people, yes, and that is the real reason Arabic feels hard. Modern Standard Arabic covers books, news, the Quran and formal writing. Nobody uses it at home. Pick Modern Standard Arabic if your goal is reading, pick one dialect if your goal is conversation, and add the second once the first is stable.

Is Arabic hard to learn on your own?

It is harder alone than it needs to be, and the reason is feedback rather than material. Pronunciation and reading aloud are the two things you cannot correct yourself in, because you cannot hear your own mistake. When I tried to start alone I failed repeatedly. What changed the outcome was a daily lesson with someone who could tell me I was wrong.

Keep learning Arabic

• The best way to learn Arabic: what we used, and what we skippedThe best way to learn Arabic, from someone who did it as an adult: the book, tutor and app that worked, the popular course we reject, and a first-month plan.
• Learn Arabic – How To StartStart to learn Arabic now. This guide explains how you can get started to learn Arabic. Start with either Formal Arabic or a local Arabic dialect.
• How I learned Arabic, and you can tooThis is my journey on how I learned Arabic. Explore the journey to help make a decision on how best you can learn Arabic.
• Arabic Educational InstitutionsUniversities and Institutions are one of the best ways to learn Arabic. We listed Universities to help aid in your decision.