Is Arabic hard to learn? What really makes it difficult

How long does it take to learn Arabic?

The best-known figure comes from the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), the US State Department's language school. It places Arabic – together with Chinese, Japanese and Korean – in its highest category: 88 weeks of full-time training to the target level, with 23 hours of class and 17 hours of self-study a week. For Spanish or French it is 30 weeks.⁠^[1]

Two things are worth knowing. The figures apply to learners whose first language is English – for them, Arabic is “exceptionally difficult”, as FSI puts it.⁠^[1] And the target is level 3 on the US government scale: being able to take part effectively in most formal and informal conversations on practical, social and professional topics⁠^[4] – not a few phrases for a holiday. How much the time differs between languages, and why, is covered in The hardest language in the world?

Is the Arabic script the hardest part?

For many it is the first hurdle. Arabic is written from right to left, and the letters join up even in print. Most of them therefore have up to four forms depending on their position in the word: on their own, at the start, in the middle and at the end.⁠^[2]

On top of that, many letters share the same basic shape and differ only in their dots. ب (b, one dot below), ت (t, two dots above) and ث (th, three dots above), for example, have the same skeleton.⁠^[2]

And the short vowels a, i and u are normally not written. There are marks for them above and below the letters, but Arabic is usually printed without them.⁠^[2] Readers have to supply the vowels from context and grammar.

The good news: a script is a limited system. That it doesn't decide difficulty on its own is shown by the FSI list itself: Persian and Urdu are also written with Arabic letters, yet they sit one category below Arabic.⁠^[1]

Standard Arabic or dialect?

That is the question to ask yourself before your first course. In everyday life, “Arabic” is not one uniform language:⁠^[3]

• The language of the Qur'an is regarded as the ideal, in Arabic اللغة الفصحى (al-lughah al-fuṣḥah, “the most eloquent language”). Classical Arabic, in which most pre-modern literary works were written, comes very close to it.
• Modern Standard Arabic differs from it only slightly in style and vocabulary. It is the language of most newspapers, books, news programmes and political speeches.
• The spoken dialects differ from it considerably – and some are not mutually intelligible. The main groups are the dialects of the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and North Africa.

What does that mean for you? If you want to understand the Qur'an better, read the news or be understood in many countries, there is no way around Standard Arabic. If you live in a particular country or have family there, you will also need the dialect in daily life. You can start with Standard Arabic and add a dialect, or the other way round – it is a trade-off, not a rule.

What is hard, and what is easier than you'd think?

Unfamiliar to many learners are some of the sounds: Arabic has guttural sounds made deep in the throat, and a series of “emphatic” consonants pronounced with a narrowing of the pharynx and a raised back of the tongue.⁠^[3] Then there are grammatical forms many languages don't have: besides singular and plural, there is a separate dual.⁠^[3]

Other things are easier than you might think:

• Roots and patterns. An Arabic word usually consists of a root of three consonants, which carries the basic meaning, and a vowel pattern, which adds the grammatical meaning. With one pattern the root k-t-b becomes كِتَاب (kitāb, “book”), with another كَاتِب (kātib, “one who writes”).⁠^[3] Once you know the patterns, new words are often easier to place.
• Regular verbs. Verbs are conjugated regularly, and there are only two tenses: one often used for the past, and one for present or future.⁠^[3]
• Cases. Standard Arabic has three cases. In the dialects they have largely disappeared, and in spoken Standard Arabic the endings are often left out too.⁠^[3]