Learning Arabic, I often benefitted from others describing their winding journey with the language. This is my attempt at returning the favour. In no particular order, I have listed some pieces of advice I would have liked to have read (and resources I would have liked to have known about!) as I started learning. 

 

Dialect or MSA?

 

If I could go back in time and give advice to my former self, I would recommend starting with a dialect first and learning Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) second. Dialects are used in the vast majority of contexts you will encounter when starting out, and no one in the Arab world orders a coffee in MSA. Dedicating a year of your life to learning, carefully speaking your first sentences, and being mocked to no end for your formality is not particularly rewarding. Instead, start out with a dialect (as much as it may upset your conservatively educated teacher).

 

Courses

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The best way to learn is immersion, where you are surrounded by native speakers. This works best when those around you are unable to speak English. I started out learning Arabic in Damascus, Syria, and stayed with a Christian family in the Bab Touma area. I am not sure if I can recommend Damascus yet - despite the recent fall of the Assad regime - but when I was there in 2009 the city provided an incredible immersive environment and my broken Arabic was tolerated wherever I went (in contrast to Beirut or Amman, where locals quickly switched to English).

 

Before starting out as a diplomat in Baghdad, I spent six weeks with a Druze family in Daliyet el Karmel near Haifa in Israel. I can highly recommend this program if you are looking for an accessible immersive dialect course. Alternatively, if you are looking to boost your MSA, the Institut Français du Proche Orient (IFPO) runs what I think are the world’s best (and best value!) summer courses. You need to have some Arabic already when you start, because the language of instruction is Arabic only. The program consists of five hours of classes a day in the morning, five days a week with a significant amount of homework in the afternoon. Every hour, you are taught by a different teacher to keep the pace high. The course is not for the fainthearted and very French in its teaching philosophy, but you will make progress.

 

My favourite resources

 

Most people I know started out with Al Kitaab, which is a textbook that focuses on MSA and takes an approach that doesn’t appeal to me (it teaches you the Arabic for United Nations well before you get taught how the basics of everyday communication). If you are wanting to start with the Syrian dialect instead, I can highly recommend Mary-Jane Liddicoat’s Syrian Colloquial Arabic
a functional course. You should be able to download it here.

 

As you progress, these are some other resources that I found valuable over the years:

• If you are wanting to start out reading simple novels, then a good place to start are the books by Lingualism. They have books in both dialect and in MSA, and you can filter them by level.

• For more intermediate level reading, I can highly recommend Laila Familiar’s abridged version of Saaq al-Bambuu and Sayyidi wa Habibi. Both are excellent, the first was my favourite and gives a unique perspective on the life of a migrant worker in Kuwait.

• ‘Master Arabic’ by Alex Strick Linschoten. An absolute gem of a book that contains a lot of material on how to overcome the intermediate learner plateau. I can’t find a download link to it anymore, but can recommend his early Arabic-themed blog posts, and would suggest you send him a ping for the PDF if you are interested.

 

Inspiration

 

As I learned the language, I was always looking for videos of non-native speakers to get inspired and to prove to myself that my aim of speaking Arabic one day was possible. If you are also looking for some encouragement, do check out these pages:

• Xavier Stephen Bisits medium post ‘How to learn Iraqi Arabic’. Many nuggets of wisdom to be found here.

• The twitter account of Ulric Shannon, now the Canadian Ambassador to Iraq and, when I was posted to Iraq, the best Arabic speaker among the diplomats in Baghdad. Highly entertaining, plus he regularly posts Arabic books that he has enjoyed reading.