The Arabic course you buy is nobody’s native language
Modern Standard Arabic is what almost every course teaches and what nobody grows up speaking. Decide which Arabic you want before planning around the 2,200-class-hour NFATC benchmark, because the choice is not reversible for free.
The current NFATC table places Arabic in Category IV: an 88-week, 2,200-class-hour baseline for its integrated ILR 3 Speaking-and-Listening target, alongside Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean.
Before spending any of them, there is a decision that most learners make by default and later regret: which Arabic.
The situation
Modern Standard Arabic is the written and formal register. News broadcasts, official documents, literature, and essentially every Arabic course sold to English speakers. It is nobody's first language — no child grows up speaking it at home.
The spoken varieties — Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf, Maghrebi and others — are what people actually speak, and they differ enough that speakers from distant regions may not follow each other easily. Egyptian has unusual reach because of Egypt's film and television output; that is a media effect, not a formal status.
The relationship between MSA and a spoken variety is not accent. It is closer to the gap between two related languages, with the additional complication that educated speakers move between them fluidly depending on situation.
What this does to a plan
Study MSA exclusively and you will read a newspaper, follow a broadcast, and be unable to have an ordinary conversation in a café — while sounding, to the person you are talking to, noticeably formal in a way English has no equivalent for.
Study one spoken variety exclusively and you will hold conversations and be unable to read.
Neither is wrong. Both are wrong for someone who did not choose.
Why the courses all teach MSA anyway
Not a conspiracy — three structural reasons.
It is the only one with a standard. One orthography, one grammar, agreed reference works. A variety has none of that, which makes it harder to write a course for and harder to certify.
It is the only one that works everywhere. A publisher choosing a variety picks one market and forfeits the others.
It is what institutions test. Exams and university programmes are MSA-based, so a course aiming at them has no choice.
So the default is set by what is publishable, not by what a given learner needs — and the learner usually finds out well after committing.
How this interacts with the 2,200 class hours
The current NFATC endpoint is integrated ILR 3 in Speaking and Listening. It is not a four-skill target, and it is not the separate S-3/R-3 endpoint in the Foreign Affairs Manual. NFATC's public category table also does not say how an Arabic programme divides those hours between MSA and regional varieties, so the 2,200 cannot settle the register decision for you.
If you want only to read — news, documents, classical texts — your target sits outside that Speaking-and-Listening benchmark. Nothing on this site models a reading-only Arabic path, because NFATC does not publish a comparable reading-only figure on the current page, and I am not going to manufacture one by subtracting skills from 2,200.
If you want only to talk to people in one country, that narrower target is also unmodelled. The official table gives no principled percentage to deduct for choosing one variety.
The 2,200 is an honest baseline for NFATC's published integrated oral target. It does not quantify a reading-only goal, one-country conversation, or any particular MSA–variety mix.
The decision, in order
1. Name the goal first. Read the news, work in the Gulf, talk to family, study the Qur'an, work in aid or diplomacy — each points somewhere different.
2. If the goal is a place or people, start with that variety. The materials are worse and you will be learning the thing you actually want.
3. If the goal is text or institutions, start with MSA. It is what everything is built for.
4. If the goal is both, plan for two tracks. The 2,200 is the only current official Category IV baseline we can anchor to, but the public table does not apportion it between those tracks.
The mistake is not picking wrong. It is picking by default, discovering two years in that the Arabic you have is not the Arabic you wanted, and concluding that Arabic is impossible. It is not impossible. It is one name covering several languages, which is a problem you can solve on day one and not on day seven hundred.
Sources
Every figure above, and where it came from. A post that traces other people's unsourced numbers does not get to have any of its own.
- Foreign Language Training — US Department of State, National Foreign Affairs Training Center
The current NFATC training timelines: a typical week is 23 class hours plus 17 hours of self-study, aimed at an integrated ILR 3 in Speaking and Listening. Category I lists 24–30 weeks; using the page's typical class week, this site derives 552–690 class hours. Categories II–IV print 828, 1,012 and 2,200.
- FSI Language Difficulty Ranking — fsi-language-courses.org
A legacy five-category reproduction and its older 600 / 900 / 1,100 / 2,200 values. It is cited only to explain why older category labels and numbers still circulate, not as the model v2 baseline.