Is Arabic hard to learn? What is actually hard, and what isn't

The short answer is yes, Arabic is one of the harder languages for English speakers. The US Foreign Service Institute, which trains American diplomats, puts it in its hardest category, alongside Chinese, Japanese and Korean. It estimates about 2,200 class hours to reach professional working proficiency, against roughly 600 to 750 for Spanish or French.

The longer answer is that most of that difficulty comes from one or two things, and they aren't the things that put people off. The script looks like the hard part, and it isn't.

What looks hard but isn't

The alphabet

Twenty-eight letters, written right to left, most of them joined to their neighbours. It looks impenetrable, and it takes about two weeks. There are no capital letters, many letters are the same shape with different dots, and spelling is far more regular than English. Once you can read the letters, you can sound out almost any word. The interactive alphabet is a good place to find out for yourself, and how Arabic letters connect explains why words look different from the chart.

Writing right to left

This feels strange for about a day. Your eyes adjust far faster than you'd expect.

Vocabulary

Arabic shares few words with English, so you don't get the free head start you get in French. But Arabic builds words from three-letter roots, and once you see the pattern, vocabulary starts to multiply. From k-t-b, to do with writing, come كِتاب kitaab (book), مَكْتَب maktab (office, desk), كاتِب kaatib (writer) and مَكْتوب maktoob (written). Learn the root, and you can often guess a word you've never seen.

What is genuinely a bit hard

A few new sounds

A handful of sounds don't exist in English: ع, a squeeze in the throat; ح, a breathy h; خ, like the ch in Scottish "loch"; and the "emphatic" letters, said with the tongue pulled back. They take a few weeks of listening and repeating. They're harder to hear than to say, and native speakers are forgiving.

Gender everywhere

Verbs, adjectives and even "you" change depending on whether you're talking to a man, a woman or a group. In Levantine, "how are you" is kifak to a man and kifik to a woman. It's a lot to track at first and becomes automatic with practice.

Plurals

Many Arabic plurals are "broken": instead of adding an ending, the vowels inside the word change. kitaab (book) becomes kutub (books). There are patterns, but for a lot of nouns you learn the plural along with the word.

The missing short vowels

Everyday Arabic writing leaves out the short vowels, so كتب could be kataba (he wrote), kutub (books) or kutiba (it was written). Native readers fill them in from context. Learners read slowly at first, and it gets faster as vocabulary grows. The vowel marks explained covers how they work.

What actually makes Arabic hard

Arabic speakers write one language and speak another. Modern Standard Arabic, or Fusha, is the written standard shared across the Arab world, used for news, books and formal speeches. Nobody speaks it at home. At home, at work and in the street, people speak a dialect: Egyptian, Levantine, Moroccan Darija, Gulf and many others. The dialects share most of their grammar with Fusha, but differ in pronunciation, everyday words and verb forms.

This is the real reason the FSI number is so large. Its 2,200 hours assume you want to read a newspaper, follow the news and talk to people, which means learning two varieties of Arabic. A lot of learners spend years on Fusha, arrive in Cairo or Beirut, and find they can't follow a conversation.

So, how to make it easier: choose the right Arabic

Pick the Arabic that matches what you want to do, and learn that one first:

• To talk to people, learn a dialect. Egyptian is understood almost everywhere thanks to a century of Egyptian film and music. Levantine is the Arabic of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. Moroccan Darija is the one to learn for Morocco.
• To read the news, literature or the Quran, learn Fusha.
• For both, start with the one you'll use first. The grammar transfers, and the second one comes much faster.

Learned this way, a dialect is a much smaller job than the FSI figure suggests: simple conversation is realistic within a few months of daily practice. How long it takes to learn Arabic breaks down the timeline.

Is Arabic easier for some people?

Yes. Speakers of Hebrew and Maltese, both closely related to Arabic, have a big head start. Speakers of Persian, Urdu and Turkish recognise a large share of the vocabulary, and Persian and Urdu use the same script. Anyone who grew up hearing Arabic at home, even without speaking it, usually finds the sounds come easily.

Where to start

Learn the alphabet, pick a dialect, and get to whole phrases quickly. If you're not sure which Arabic to choose, here's how the four compare, with a game to test whether you can already hear the difference.