Learn Arabic on your own

Which Arabic to learn#

Arabic exists in two layers. The literary language — fusha, or Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) — is used in books, the press, news and formal speech and is the same across the Arab world. In daily life people speak dialects: Egyptian, Levantine, Maghrebi, Gulf. They differ noticeably from each other and from MSA.

If your goal is to read, follow the news or classical texts, start with MSA. If you are moving to or working in a particular country, take its dialect alongside the script. Many self-learners go this way: six months of MSA as a base, then they add the dialect of the region they need.

The script: the first month#

Arabic is written right to left. The alphabet has 28 letters, and almost all of them join their neighbours, so a letter has up to four shapes: isolated, initial, medial and final. Six letters never join the letter after them — learn them as a separate list. Many letters differ only by dots: ب, ت, ث.

Short vowels are usually not written. They are shown by vowel marks (harakat) above and below the letters, but newspapers and street signs leave them out and the reader restores the word from knowledge of the language. Imagine English written as "th ct st n th mt" — readable only once you know the words. So at the start use fully vowelled texts (textbooks and children's books are written that way) and drop the marks gradually.

An exercise for the month: every day copy one line of vowelled text by hand and read it aloud. The stage is done when you read an unfamiliar vowelled word fluently.

Sounds English does not have#

The hardest ones are the throat sounds ع and ح, the emphatic ص, ض, ط, ظ, which are pronounced with the back of the tongue raised and darken the vowels around them, the glottal stop ء (the catch in the middle of "uh-oh"), and the guttural خ and غ. You need to tell ح from ه and س from ص from day one: they are different roots and different words. Listen to minimal pairs, repeat them and record yourself.

Roots and patterns#

Most words are built from a root of three consonants that carries a general meaning. The root k-t-b is about writing: كتب "he wrote", كتاب "book", كاتب "writer", مكتب "office, desk", مكتبة "library". What changes is the pattern — the arrangement of vowels, prefixes and suffixes around the root. English has a faint echo of this in sing–sang–song, but in Arabic it is the main way the vocabulary works.

The practical advice follows: file words in your notes by root. Arabic dictionaries are traditionally organised that way — you look up the root, not the first letter of the word. After a couple of months you will start spotting the root in an unfamiliar word and guessing its meaning.

Grammar in order#

The definite article ال attaches to the word. Before "sun letters" its l assimilates to the next sound: الشمس is read ash-shams. There are two genders and three numbers — singular, dual and plural — and the plural is often "broken": formed by changing the pattern, not by adding an ending (كتاب → كتب), much like English man → men, but for a large share of nouns. The verb has two basic forms — past and present — plus a system of derived forms (the verb "forms" I–X) from the root, which is convenient to learn one form a week from the third month on.

Notes#

Three sections: roots (the root, its general meaning, the words you found), broken plural patterns, and verb forms with an example. Write words with their vowel marks even after you can read without them: a wrong vowel changes the meaning. Put them into a spaced repetition deck grouped by root.

Realistic benchmarks#

Arabic is in the hardest category for English speakers in the US Foreign Service Institute ranking, together with Chinese, Japanese and Korean. In the first six months of daily study you can realistically read vowelled text with confidence, know the basic grammar of MSA and a few hundred words. Following the news and speaking freely take considerably longer.

Step-by-step plan

1. Month 1 — alphabet and vowel marksAll 28 letters in every shape, the non-joining letters, copying and reading a vowelled line every day.
2. Month 2 — hard sounds and the articleThe pairs ح/ه, س/ص, the sound ع; sun and moon letters; first phrases with ال.
3. Months 3–4 — roots and the verbA root-based word list, past and present tense, broken plurals.
4. Months 5–6 — verb forms and readingOne derived verb form a week, texts with partial vowel marks; choosing a dialect if you need one.

Check yourself

Sources

• AlmaanyFree Arabic–English dictionary
  free
• ForvoNative speakers pronouncing words — useful for the hard sounds
  free
• AnkiFlashcards for words grouped by root
  free

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