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 you spend 2,200 hours, because the choice is not reversible for free.

Aug 8, 2026Kevin Fan

Arabic is 2,200 FSI class hours — the hardest band, 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 hours

FSI's figure covers professional working proficiency, and FSI trains people who need both registers. Doing both is what the number describes.

If you want only to read — news, documents, classical texts — your project is smaller than 2,200 hours, in the same way a reading-only goal in any language is smaller. Nothing on this site models that, because FSI does not publish a reading-only figure, and I am not going to invent one.

If you want only to talk to people in one country, that is also smaller, and also unmodelled.

The 2,200 is honest for the full target. It overstates a narrow one, and I cannot tell you by how much.

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, expect the full figure. That is what the 2,200 describes.

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.

The Arabic page, and what the hours assume.

Posts resting on the same evidence, picked by shared citations rather than by hand.

Is Japanese FSI Category IV or Category V? Both, and that is the problem
Two incompatible numbering schemes for the FSI difficulty categories are in circulation, and neither is wrong. Which one a page uses tells you whether it copied its data or checked it.
Japanese and Chinese sit in the same FSI band. Only one carries an asterisk
Both are 2,200 class hours. FSI marks Japanese, and only Japanese, as harder than the rest of its group — a footnote with no second number attached. Here is what it is doing in our model and why the figure it produces is an estimate.
The writing system is the smallest part of a hard language
It is the first thing everyone asks about and the last thing that matters. Even a generous estimate for learning a script is a low single-digit percentage of what the language costs.

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, Foreign Service Institute
The class-hour bands every estimate on this site starts from, and the definition of the proficiency they lead to (ILR Speaking-3 / Reading-3).
FSI Language Difficulty Ranking — fsi-language-courses.org
Which languages sit in which band. The State Department publishes the categories as an image, so per-language assignment comes from independent reproductions that agree with each other and with the official hour bands.