Is Arabic Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content!)

Arabic is one of the more difficult languages for an English speaker to learn. It is fundamentally very different from English in a great many ways, not to mention the fact it uses an entirely different writing system. Learning it will take time and patience, though it’s far from impossible for an English speaker.

Arabic is a vitally important language culturally and historically.

It is one of the six languages of the United Nations, and is spoken by around 360 million people today.

Learning it will take time and there is no shortcut or easy method, but it is well worth the time you will spend doing so.

Let’s find out more.

How difficult is Arabic to learn?

Arabic is among the more difficult languages to learn as an English speaker.

Firstly, it’s important to note that Arabic is what’s often called a language continuum, rather than just a language.

This means that there are many very different forms of Arabic that are spoken over an extremely wide area.

There are lots of internal differences between all these different forms of Arabic.

While most of them are largely mutually intelligible, this is not always the case.

You’ll most likely have to commit yourself to learning a single dialect, then, at least at first, otherwise you’ll have a much bigger struggle on your hands.

Understanding the families that languages belong to can help you have the basic idea of what makes a language difficult to learn.

English is part of the family of Germanic languages, all of which belong to the Indo-European family.

Arabic, on the other hand, is Afro-Asiatic. Both of these families comprise dozens if not hundreds of languages, so this gives you a sense of how far apart the two languages are.

Learning any language, even a direct neighbor of your own is always difficult—learning one that is so far apart is even more difficult.

There are many aspects of Arabic speech that are difficult for English speakers to get to grips with, but you also have the fact that Arabic uses an entirely different writing system, called the Arabic Abjad.

For a full understanding of the language,  both spoken and written, you will also need to learn this.

Learning Arabic is difficult, then, and it will take time.

However, you are more than rewarded for your effort and there are countless advantages to learning Arabic, so if you’re committed it’s a great use of your time—and just how much time will that take?

How long will it take to learn Arabic?

The FSI categorizes languages based on how difficult they are to learn for English speakers, and gives rough guides for how long you can expect to spend learning each language.

Arabic is considered a category five language, meaning it is among the hardest languages for an English speaker to learn.

Category five languages generally require around 2200 hours of study to get to the point of basic mastery.

At this point, you’ll be able to conduct yourself in Arabic and you’ll have a full grip on the language.

However, the process of learning does not stop there. Most teachers would recommend the best way to continue to develop your skills at this point is to go and live in the country and immerse yourself in the language every day.

This is the only way you can really, truly master any language.

Classes are, of course, absolutely essential, but it’s only really one part of learning the language.

It can vary from person to person, but once your studies are up, you can then expect to need around 3-5 years to be at the point that you have fully mastered the language on a native level.

It takes time, then—there’s no denying that.

Is Chinese harder than Arabic?

Most would consider Chinese to be a harder language to learn than Arabic for a lot of fairly subtle reasons.

In terms purely of the writing system, though both are alien to an English speaker, Mandarin Chinese has the far more complex system than Arabic.

In spoken terms, too, Chinese is a lot harder than Arabic.

However, they are both category five languages, so you could probably master both languages in roughly the same amount of time—Mandarin just may be a more difficult task.

What is the most difficult part of learning Arabic?

Most tend to say that the hardest part of learning Arabic is the verbs and their inflections.

Inflection is something we tend to take for granted in our own language but it can convey oceans of meaning.

Getting to grips with this and gaining an understanding of all the different verbs and all the different ways they can be used is usually what people say was the hardest part of learning Arabic for them.

You might expect the writing system to be the most difficult part, but for many this is relatively simple compared to the complexity of the grammar and inflections of Arabic.

Again, then, there is no two ways about the fact that learning Arabic is going to require your full commitment and attention.

There’s no shortcut and you’ll be spending long hours in the classroom and then an even longer amount of time afterwards properly mastering the language in day to day speech.

But it will more than reward you for your effort, so go ahead and give it a try if you think you’d benefit from learning Arabic!

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