Here are some Basic facts you may need to know before to start learning Arabic:

- Arabic language is spoken by over 230 million worldwide.
- Arabic is spoken by a majority of population in these countries: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.
- Arabic language is the liturgical language Islam.
- There are three distinct forms of Arabic:

• Classical or Qur’anical Arabic.

• Formal or Modern Standard Arabic.

• Spoken or Colloquial Arabic.

- Classical Arabic is primarily learned for reading and reciting Islamic religious texts.
- Modern Standard Arabic provides a universal form of the language that can be understood by all and is commonly used in radio and TV news broadcasts, poetry, and conversation between Arabic-speaking people of different dialects.
- Colloquial Arabic is a collective term for the spoken dialects of people throughout the Arab world.
- Arab colloquial dialects are generally only spoken languages.

- The most famous Colloquial Arabic is the Egyptian colloquial.

2 - Which Arabic to learn?
To answer to this question you need to ask yourself why you want to learn Arabic. If you want to learn Arabic to read and study religious texts then you learn Classical Arabic.
If you need the language to speak to people and communicate with them, then you should learn the dialect of the country you are visiting or staying in, whether it is Egypt, the gulf countries, Levantine or North Africa, Iraq or Sudan etc.

3- No shortcuts in learning Arabic, I mean if you want to learn the language then you MUST learn how to read and write it in Arabic script, not in roman or Latin or any other language characters. Whatever Arabic you choose, you will need to read and write Arabic, why?
Because Arabic is cursive language, which means all letters are connected in a word, even more , you can find a subject, an object, or two , a verb and an article all joined into one word like this one
سنُكَلِّمُكُمْ
Which can be translated as “we will talk to you.”
And This Word

فَأَسْقَيْنَاكُمُوهُ

Then we give it to you to drink.

This means when you can read and write Arabic, you will be able to know which is the root word, what are other suffixes and prefixes attached to the root word.

 

4- Language requires a lot of repetition, a lot of reference experiences, and a consistent commitment and investment. train your ears to listen to Arabic language by all means, listen to Arabic radio stations, watch Arabic TVs.

5- As in all languages, NOT every Arabic speaker is Arabic teacher or tutor. Find a good one.

 

6- By all means you will need to learn a dialect to communicate with people in the street, Egyptian dialect is widely understood and easy to learn. However if you are in the gulf I suggest you learn gulf dialect or Levantine if you are in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine or Jordan.

7 - Good news here, the difference between Arabic dialects is not huge, In general, dialects are derived from Classical Arabic, but some change happened to them. Sometimes, it is a preference of using a different word but have same meaning, for example, the word train, metro, tube, tunnel, subway, and underground in English are used by different people in different countries referring to the same thing, so Arabic is not different to other languages in this context.

8 - Major difference in Arabic dialectics is in question words, pronouns and the way the letters jeem ج and Qaaf ق pronounced.

9 – A dictionary will be useful after 100 hours of studying Arabic; at least you can have an electronic free one.

 

10- Arabic is very intersting language.