Learn Arabic for Travel, Work and Study

The script is an alphabet of consonants and long vowels, joined up in writing, with no capital letters and no print form distinct from handwriting. Most letters have up to four shapes depending on their position in the word, which sounds daunting and is learned in two or three weeks, since the shapes are variations on one form. The three short vowels are written as small marks above and below the line only in the Qur'an, in poetry and in children's books; everywhere else the reader fills them in, so a learner reads whole words from the start, as English readers do. Numbers are written left to right even inside right-to-left text, and in the eastern Arab world they use their own digits, not the “Arabic numerals” Europe took from them.

The sounds that mark Arabic come from the back of the mouth and the throat: the “ʿayn”, a voiced squeeze of the throat written with an apostrophe-like sign in transliteration; the “qāf”, a k from deep in the throat; the “ḥā”, a breathy h; and a set of emphatic consonants — ṣ, ḍ, ṭ, ẕ — said with the tongue pulled back, which make Arabic call itself “the language of the ḍād”. The grammar is Semitic: nouns are masculine or feminine, there is a dual as well as a plural, verbs agree with their subject in gender and number, and the written language keeps case endings that the dialects have dropped. Word order in the standard is often verb first.

Address is warm and formulaic. “As-salāmu ʿalaykum” — peace be upon you — is answered “wa ʿalaykum as-salām”; “ahlan wa sahlan”, welcome, is answered “ahlan bīk”; thanks are met with “ʿafwan”; and the name of God is everywhere, in “inshallah”, God willing, which can mean yes, maybe or never depending on tone, “alhamdulillah”, thank God, the answer to “how are you”, and “mashallah”, said in admiration. Titles and kinship terms do the work of pronouns — “ustādh”, teacher, for any educated man, “ḥajj” and “ḥajja” for the elderly — and “ḥabībī”, my dear, is said between men, between women and to strangers without a thought.

Modern Standard Arabic is the one written language from Morocco to Oman and the spoken language of news bulletins, speeches and formal occasions; every educated Arab reads and understands it and almost nobody speaks it with their children. The dialects are the languages of life. Egyptian is understood everywhere because of Cairo's films and songs; Levantine — Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian, Palestinian — is soft, close to Egyptian and widely taught; Gulf Arabic is what the Emirates and Saudi Arabia speak; Maghrebi — Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian — is thick with French and Berber and hard for easterners to follow. Maltese, written in Latin letters and spoken in a European Union state, is a descendant of Arabic.

Arabic is in the hardest group for an English speaker, with Chinese, Japanese and Korean: the US Foreign Service Institute allows around 2,200 classroom hours to professional working proficiency, roughly four times the figure for Spanish. The script is not the reason — it is solid within a month — and nor is the grammar, which is regular once the patterns are seen. The length comes from a vocabulary with almost no cognates, from sounds the English mouth has never made, from the vowel-less writing that slows reading for a year, and above all from the fact that a learner needs two Arabics, the standard for reading and a dialect for talking, and that the two are learned largely separately. Learners who choose one dialect early and add the standard beside it progress fastest.

In Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha and the other Gulf cities, English is the working language of business, shopping and most daily life, and a foreigner can live for years without Arabic; the government's own services are bilingual. Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon serve tourists in English and everyone else in Arabic, with French beside it in Beirut; Morocco and Tunisia reach for French before English. Everywhere, the ministry window, the police station and the family home are in Arabic. Multinationals, banks and the Gulf's universities and hospitals work in English; Arab companies, the public sector and the courts work in Arabic. Universities in Egypt and the Levant teach the humanities and law in Arabic and the sciences and medicine largely in English; the Gulf's universities are mostly English-medium, and the great Arabic-language institutions — al-Azhar in Cairo, the universities of Damascus and Jordan — teach in Arabic and run institutes for foreigners who want to learn it.

• English owes it a vocabulary: Algebra, alcohol, alchemy, coffee, sugar, cotton, zero, admiral, sofa, magazine, tariff and safari all came into European languages from Arabic, many through Spain.
• Inshallah: “God willing” — attached to any statement about the future, and meaning anything from “certainly” to “don't count on it”. Learners spend years learning to read its tone.
• Arabic numerals are not Arabic: The digits Europe calls Arabic came from India via Arab scholars; the eastern Arab world writes its own set of ten digits, and both sets run left to right.
• Two of something: Arabic has a dual: “kitāb” is a book, “kitābān” two books, “kutub” books. Nouns, verbs and pronouns all have a form for exactly two.
• The language of the ḍād: Arabic names itself after the letter “ḍād”, an emphatic d said with the tongue drawn back, which Arabs long believed no other language possessed.
• One root, a whole office: From “k-t-b”, write: “kātib”, a clerk, “maktūb”, a letter or fate, “maktab”, an office, “maktaba”, a library, “mukātaba”, correspondence. Learn the patterns and vocabulary multiplies.
• Maltese is Arabic: The national language of Malta, a member of the European Union, descends from the Arabic of medieval Sicily, written in Latin letters and heavy with Italian — the only Arabic-derived language written that way.

Arabic has no single certificate with the standing of the DELE or the JLPT, and no Arab state tests the language for a visa or a residence permit; the Gulf's residence systems run on sponsorship and paperwork, and Egypt's and Jordan's on the same. Nationality laws across the region ask for a knowledge of Arabic, judged in an interview, and naturalisation is rare enough that the question seldom arises. What exists for learners who need a document is a small set of credentials. The CIMA, the International Certificate of Arabic Proficiency from the Arab World Institute in Paris, is the one exam aligned to the CEFR from A1 to C2 and is sat at centres in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. In North America, ACTFL rates spoken and written Arabic — the standard or a main dialect — on its scale from Novice to Superior. And the Arabic institutes of the region's universities — the Arabic Language Institute of the American University in Cairo, the Qasid Institute in Amman, the institutes of al-Azhar and of the Saudi and Qatari universities for non-native speakers — issue level certificates at the end of each course, which Arabic-taught degree programmes and employers accept.

Universities admit foreign students to Arabic-taught degrees after a preparatory year at their own institute or on such a certificate at an upper-intermediate level; the English-medium universities of the Gulf ask for English, not Arabic. Employers in the Gulf rarely ask for Arabic and value it when they find it; employers in Egypt, the Levant and the Maghreb assume it. With steady classes most adults read the script within a month, handle a market and a taxi in a dialect within six months, follow the news in the standard after a year or two, and reach a professional command in three or more.

Arabic self-study has one indispensable and peculiar tool: a dictionary organised by root rather than by alphabetical order, so that “maktab” is found under “k-t-b”, which is how the language itself thinks. Around it a learner needs a textbook that teaches the standard and a dialect side by side, a dialect dictionary for the spoken words the standard dictionaries omit, flashcards that play a native voice for each entry, and a daily dose of Arabic in the ear — news in the standard, films and songs in the dialect — long before the words make sense.

A tutor is nearly indispensable in Arabic for the sounds, which no recording corrects — the ʿayn, the qāf and the emphatic consonants are learned by saying them to someone who says them back — and for the dialect, which is where the textbooks are thinnest and where real Arabs live. A good tutor also keeps the two Arabics apart in the learner's head, teaching which words belong to the news and which to the kitchen, and supplies the formulas and the replies without which correct Arabic still sounds like a broadcast.