My TijarahThe Road toFluency inArabic
Why the language of the Qur’an iscloser than you have been told.
What is inside
Contents
Why it is worth it
- You already know some ArabicAnd more grammar than you think
- What a translation cannot give youThe Qur’an, ash-Shafi’i and Ibn Taymiyyah
- The one idea that changes everythingIbn Khaldun on why rules are not enough
Why it is learnable
- A hundred words, half the Qur’anThe kindest fact about the Book
- One root, a whole familyHow Arabic multiplies what you learn
- The verb, in ten shapesThe most useful table in the language
- Eight ideas that open sentencesThe grammar worth meeting early
The journey
- Six steps, and no stopwatchWhat changes in you, in order
- What each step coversFrom the letters to the classical books
How to walk it
- The daily habitFour parts of whatever time you have
- How to stop forgettingThe one thing that makes words stay
- Read every dayThe habit that does most of the work
- What actually stops peopleFive things, and how to avoid them
- Honest answersIncluding how long this takes
- Where a teacher fitsThe shortest lever there is
Where you are starting from
You already know some Arabic.
You say these every day, some of them five times a day, and you picked them up without ever sitting down to study.
بِسْمِ اللَّه
bismillah
in the name of Allah
الْحَمْدُ لِلَّه
alhamdulillah
all praise is for Allah
اللَّهُ أَكْبَر
Allahu akbar
Allah is greater
سُبْحَانَ اللَّه
subhanallah
how perfect Allah is
السَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُم
as-salamu alaykum
peace be upon you
كِتَاب
kitab
a book
عِلْم
‘ilm
knowledge
صَبْر
sabr
patience
Take the one you say most often and pull it apart. There are four pieces in it, and you will meet all four again on almost every page of Arabic you ever read.
You already handle a definite article, a preposition, a three letter root and a case ending. Correctly, in prayer, several times a day, and nobody ever taught you the names for any of it. Most people sit down to learn Arabic convinced they are beginning at zero. You are further in than that.
Most of what you learn from here will attach itself to something you already say.
Why it is worth it
A translation is somebody else’s understanding, handed to you.
Read the Qur’an in English for thirty years and you will know it well. What you will know is a translator’s reading of it: his vocabulary, his decision about which of three senses a verb carries in this place, his best attempt at a word English has no twin for. Usually he is a careful scholar who has done honest work. He is still standing between you and the speech of your Lord.
إِنَّآ أَنزَلْنَـٰهُ قُرْءَٰنًا عَرَبِيًّا لَّعَلَّكُمْ تَعْقِلُونَ
Indeed We sent it down as an Arabic Qur’an, that you might understand.
Yusuf 12:2
بِلِسَانٍ عَرَبِىٍّ مُّبِينٍ
In a clear Arabic tongue.
ash-Shu’ara 26:195
فعلى كل مسلم أن يتعلم من لسان العرب ما بلغه جهده
It is a duty upon every Muslim to learn of the tongue of the Arabs as much as he is able.
فإن نفس اللغة العربية من الدين، ومعرفتها فرض واجب
The Arabic language is itself part of the religion, and knowing it is an obligation.
The one idea that changes everything
The tailor who could not sew.
Six hundred years ago Ibn Khaldun wondered why the finest grammarians he knew could not write a decent letter to a friend. His answer explains most of what goes wrong for students today. A language, he said, is a malakah, a habit the tongue acquires, closer to a craft in the hands than to anything you could sit an exam in.
فإن صناعة العربية إنما هي معرفة قوانين هذه الملكة ومقاييسها خاصة، فهو علم بكيفية لا نفس كيفية
The craft of grammar is only the knowledge of the rules of this faculty and its measures. It is knowledge of a how, not the how itself.
His example is a tailor. A man can describe stitching to you in perfect detail: thread through the eye of the needle, in through both edges of the cloth, out the far side, back round to where he began. Hand him the needle and he cannot manage a stitch. Grammar sits in that same relation to Arabic.
That sounds discouraging until you turn it round. Cleverness carries you through a subject. A habit asks something easier of you, which is that you keep showing up, and ordinary people build habits every week of their lives. Ibn Khaldun is specific about what builds this one.
حصول ملكة اللسان العربي إنما هو بكثرة الحفظ من كلام العرب، حتى يرتسم في خياله المنوال الذي نسجوا عليه تراكيبهم فينسج هو عليه
The faculty of the Arabic tongue is obtained only through much memorising of the speech of the Arabs, until the loom upon which they wove their constructions is imprinted in his imagination, so that he weaves upon it too.
Fill yourself with real Arabic until the pattern is printed on you. Then use it.
Why it is learnable
A hundred words will carry you through half the Qur’an.
Some words work far harder than others. That holds in any language, and in the Qur’an it is more pronounced than usual. Count every word in the Book, rank them by how often they turn up, and you get this shape.
25%
from 10 words
One evening of work, and a quarter of every page is yours.
58%
from 100 words
Half the Book, off a single sheet of vocabulary.
85%
from 670 words
Eighty five percent, and the decoding has turned into reading.
Ten words is one evening’s work. A hundred fits on a single sheet you could keep in your wallet, and it carries you past half of every page you open. Students who quit Arabic rarely quit because the grammar beat them. They quit in the first few months, before anybody has shown them how fast the early words pay.
Why it is learnable
Learn one root and you have learned a family.
Behind most Arabic words sit three letters holding one idea between them. Change the shape around those letters and you change what is being done with the idea. The idea itself stays put. Take the root for knowing.
Three letters
ع ل م
The idea of knowing
عَلِمَ
he knew
عَلَّمَ
he taught
تَعَلَّمَ
he learned
اِسْتَعْلَمَ
he enquired
عِلْم
knowledge
عَالِم
a scholar
مَعْلُوم
known
تَعْلِيم
teaching
مُعَلِّم
a teacher
عَلِيم
all knowing
Knowing, teaching, learning, a scholar, a teacher, knowledge itself. Ten entries in a dictionary with one idea underneath them. You will not learn these one at a time. You will start recognising them, and recognising costs a fraction of what memorising costs.
Each root you learn properly hands you a family. That is the reason the first months feel slow and the months after them do not.
And the shape around it carries meaning too
فَاعِل
the one doing it
كَاتِب
a writer
مَفْعَل
the place it happens
مَكْتَب
a desk, an office
مِفْعَال
the thing it is done with
مِفْتَاح
a key
A student who can see the root under a word stops counting vocabulary and starts collecting families.
Why it is learnable
Ten shapes, and thousands of words.
Pour a root into one of ten moulds and the meaning bends in a direction you can predict: made to happen, done alongside somebody else, done to yourself, asked for. The root keeps its idea the whole way through.
| Shape | Pattern | What the shape adds | Example | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I | فَعَلَfa’ala | The bare meaning of the root | عَلِمَ’alima | he knew |
| II | فَعَّلَfa’’ala | Made to happen, or done intensely | عَلَّمَ’allama | he taught |
| III | فَاعَلَfa’ala | Done to or with another party | جَاهَدَjahada | he strove against |
| IV | أَفْعَلَaf’ala | Caused to happen | أَنْزَلَanzala | he sent down |
| V | تَفَعَّلَtafa’’ala | Form two, turned back on the doer | تَعَلَّمَta’allama | he learned |
| VI | تَفَاعَلَtafa’ala | Done to one another | تَعَاوَنَta’awana | they helped one another |
| VII | اِنْفَعَلَinfa’ala | It happened, with no doer named | اِنْشَقَّinshaqqa | it split apart |
| VIII | اِفْتَعَلَifta’ala | Done for oneself, or with effort | اِسْتَمَعَistama’a | he listened |
| IX | اِفْعَلَّif’alla | Colours, and little else | اِسْوَدَّiswadda | it turned black |
| X | اِسْتَفْعَلَistaf’ala | Seeking or asking for the meaning | اِسْتَغْفَرَistaghfara | he sought forgiveness |
Read down the third column rather than across it. Once a doubled middle letter starts to feel like cause, and a sin on the front like asking, you will meet verbs you have never seen before and understand them anyway.
Why it is learnable
Eight ideas that open almost any sentence.
Arabic grammar is enormous and you will use a fraction of it. These eight do most of the lifting. Almost everything you meet later refines one of them.
Most Arabic words are three letters in a costume. Learn the root and a whole family comes with it.
The letters and vowels around a root carry meaning of their own: the doer, the place, the tool, the asking.
Noun, verb, particle. Almost all of grammar follows from this one question, so ask it of every word you meet.
Subject and predicate with nothing between them. Arabic has no word for "is", which trips people up for about a week and then becomes a gift.
Two nouns joined together: the book of the student. It turns up in almost every line you will read.
On a noun they mean my, your, his. On a verb they mean me, you, him. One small table opens a quarter of the Qur’an.
English relies on word order to say who did what to whom. Arabic puts it in the endings, which is how it can shuffle words about and stay clear.
The last one is no rule at all. Read enough and the right sense of a difficult line arrives on its own, and you will not be able to say which rule gave it to you.
The journey
Six steps, and no stopwatch.
Six steps, in the order they are best taken. You will not find hours or levels pinned to them. Students move at speeds we cannot guess at from here, and a schedule you fall behind hands you a reason to stop. Each step below says what changes in you, and leaves the calendar out of it.
- Step 1The sound and the script
The letters stop being a puzzle and become something you read.
- Step 2Your first sentences
You read a simple line and can say why it means what it means.
- Step 3The verb, and the shape of words
The Qur’an begins arriving as sentences rather than sounds.
- Step 4The endings
The endings make sense, and the vowel marks come off.
- Step 5Reading on your own
You pick up Arabic books for what is in them.
- Step 6The language becomes yours
The language stops being something you study and becomes yours.
The journey
What the first three steps cover.
The sound and the script
The letters stop being a puzzle and become something you read.
You open the mushaf somewhere you have never read, and take a line aloud at a steady pace without stopping to work out a letter.
Your first sentences
You read a simple line and can say why it means what it means.
You take a short ayah apart word by word and can account for every piece of it, prefixes and all.
The verb, and the shape of words
The Qur’an begins arriving as sentences rather than sounds.
You meet an unfamiliar word, find its root and its shape, and land on the meaning more often than you miss.
The journey
And what the last three ask of you.
The endings
The endings make sense, and the vowel marks come off.
You read a paragraph of unvowelled prose aloud and put the right ending on each word as it comes.
Reading on your own
You pick up Arabic books for what is in them.
You finish a whole Arabic book for what it says, then reach for another one.
The language becomes yours
The language stops being something you study and becomes yours.
There is no test to pass here. You have stopped studying Arabic and started reading in it.
How to walk it
What a day of Arabic looks like.
Twenty minutes today and twenty tomorrow will carry you further than three hours on a Sunday. Ibn Khaldun said as much six centuries before anybody measured it: the habit forms through repeated action, one day after another, and it comes apart when the days stop. Whatever time you have, split it roughly like this.
ReviewA quarter
Whatever is due from before, and nothing beyond that. It goes first because it is the block you will want to skip on a tired evening.
StudyA third
Whatever you are working through, with your teacher or on your own. One thing understood properly will do more than three skimmed.
ReadA quarter
Something a shade below your level, read for meaning with the dictionary shut. This is where the language gets built.
Say itThe rest
A few sentences of your own, out loud, from whatever you studied today. Alone is fine. A mistake made out loud is one somebody can correct.
If two of the four is all you can manage, make them review and reading. If ten minutes is all you have, take the ten minutes. What counts is that there is another session tomorrow.
You will miss days. Everybody does. Pick it up the next morning without trying to make up the lost time, and do what you can to stop a second day going by.
How to walk it
Everything leaks, and there is a simple way to stop it.
Meet a word once and it will be gone inside a week. Every student loses them at that rate; it is how memory behaves. Trying harder on the day you first meet a word does very little. Coming back to it four or five times, at widening gaps, does almost all the work.
Each dot is a review. It lifts you back to the top and flattens the slope on the way down. By the fifth the line has almost stopped falling.
Same day
Before you sleep, while the shape is still fresh.
The next day
The drop is steepest in the first day.
Three days later
It costs you something to recall it now. That cost is the learning.
A week later
Words that survive a week tend to survive.
Three weeks later
By now it is settling in properly.
A couple of months later
From here, bumping into it while reading does the job.
How to walk it
Read every day, and read easy things.
Read Arabic every day at a level where you follow nearly all of it. Read it the way you read your own language, for what it says, rather than for the grammar inside it. Of everything in this guide, this is the habit that does most of the work.
Choosing a text is easier than it sounds. Stopping more than a couple of times in a hundred words means the book is too hard, and you have spent the evening practising dictionary lookups. Go down a level; there is no shame in it. Never stopping at all means go up one.
Roughly the order it gets easier in
- The Qur’an you already knowFrom the start
Short, familiar, half memorised already. You know what these say before you can read them, which makes them the gentlest possible start.
- Graded stories written for learnersEarly
Books that start almost absurdly simple and climb page by page. Any decent one will do. Read it for the story.
- Longer narrative, still gradedMiddle
History, the lives of the companions, adab. Real paragraphs, written with a learner in mind.
- Hadith collectionsMiddle
The kindest reading at this stage, because each one finishes before you tire of it.
- Plain modern tafsirLater
Clear, plain Arabic across the whole Qur’an. This is the one that convinces you that you can read.
- Classical commentary, and the poetsLater still
Nothing simplified, nothing abridged. The shelf you always meant to get to.
How to walk it
Five things that stop people, and none of them is ability.
Students who quit rarely quit because the language beat them. It is usually one of these five, and all five can be seen coming.
Collecting instead of finishing
Nine courses begun and none finished. Ibn Khaldun gave a chapter to this one: the sheer number of books on a subject gets in the way of learning it.
Instead: One thing at a time, front to back, before you let yourself start another.
Grammar with no Arabic in it
Years of rules and not one book read. Knowing how a thing is done will never be the same as doing it.
Instead: Let every hour of grammar earn an hour of reading.
Never saying anything out loud
You follow a great deal and freeze the moment somebody asks you to say something. Listening and reading build understanding. Only speaking builds speech.
Instead: Say it or write it the same day you meet it. A few minutes will do.
Studying in bursts
A heroic weekend, then three weeks of nothing. The habit forms through repeated action on consecutive days, Ibn Khaldun wrote, and it fades when the days stop.
Instead: Little and often, and try not to let two days go by.
Learning entirely alone
You cannot hear your own accent or catch the mistakes you do not know you are making, and you cannot tell a page you understood from a page you only felt you understood.
Instead: A teacher, even once a week. It is the shortest lever there is.
Honest answers
Including the one you most want answered.
How long will it take?
We would rather explain why we have not answered it than make a number up. Students move at speeds we cannot guess at: the hours they have, the teacher they find, how much Arabic was already in their ear from childhood. Put a date on it and the day you fall behind becomes the day you think about stopping. What we will say is that the early return is large. Long before anyone would call you fluent, the surahs you pray with will start making sense to you, and most students find that alone was worth it.
Which course or book should I use?
We have named none, on purpose. What suits you depends on where you live, what you can spend and who is teaching you, and a mediocre book with a good teacher will beat a famous book on your own. Take this guide to a teacher you trust, show them where you have got to, and pick something together.
Am I too old to start?
No. Adults learn a language differently from children, which people mistake for learning it worse. You have patience, you spot patterns, and you understand what grammar is for. What a child has over you is a complete lack of embarrassment, and you can borrow that today for nothing.
Should I learn a dialect too?
Only if you have a reason to. If you came for the Qur’an and the Sunnah and the books of the scholars, fusha is the target and a dialect is a detour. If you also want to sit and talk with people in Cairo or Riyadh, add one once the fusha underneath is steady.
Is memorising Qur’an enough to learn Arabic?
It is a magnificent start and it will not finish the job on its own. Memorising without understanding trains your recall and leaves your comprehension where it was. Do both at once, learning what the words mean as you commit them, and the Qur’an becomes the centre of your study instead of something running alongside it.
Where a teacher fits
The part a book cannot do for you.
One last thing. Every tradition this guide draws on takes for granted that you have a teacher, and none of them treats it as an extra.
Your ear
You cannot hear your own accent. A letter made in the wrong part of the mouth sounds right to the person making it and wrong to everybody else, sometimes for years, until somebody kindly says so.
Your mistakes
The mistakes that cost you are the ones you do not know are mistakes. You cannot look those up, because you do not know to go looking.
Your pace
A teacher can tell you whether the page you half understood was understood, and whether to move on. On your own you will rush some weeks and stall others.
Ibn Khaldun gave a whole chapter to travelling in search of knowledge and sitting with scholars. What you take face to face, he said, settles in a way that reading on your own does not. An hour a week will do it. Work the other days yourself, with this guide beside you, and bring what you have done to be looked at.
My Tijarah
Start with a teacher this week.
Vetted, qualified Qur'an and Arabic teachers, one to one, matched to your level and your week. Your first lesson is free, so you can see what it feels like before you decide anything.
Find your teacher→mytijarah.co.uk
A closing word
Begin, and ask for help beginning.
وَقُل رَّبِّ زِدْنِي عِلْمًا
“And say: My Lord, increase me in knowledge.”
Surah Ta-Ha · 20:114
You have met most of this line already. The عِلْمًا comes from the root you saw a few pages back, the same three letters sitting behind a scholar and a teacher. The رَبّ you say in every rak’ah.
Begin this week. Some days will feel slow and you will want to leave it; go easy on yourself on those, keep the habit alive, and ask Allah to make it easy. Of all the students we have watched start, the ones who kept walking are glad they did.
My TijarahSources and method
Where everything here came from.
Every figure and quotation here traces back to something you can go and check.
Ibn Khaldun
- Al-Muqaddimah, book six: that language is an acquired craft faculty; that the faculty of the tongue is other than the craft of grammar; that it is obtained by much memorising of real Arabic; and that tool sciences should be studied only as far as they serve the goal.
- Also his chapters on finishing one book before opening another, on not letting long gaps fall between sittings, and on sitting with teachers rather than reading alone.
- Text as printed in Tarikh Ibn Khaldun, volume one. Renderings here are our own.
The rulings
- Imam ash-Shafi’i, ar-Risalah, on the duty of every Muslim to learn of the tongue of the Arabs as much as he is able.
- Ibn Taymiyyah, Iqtida as-Sirat al-Mustaqim: Arabic is the emblem of Islam and its people, and knowing it is an obligation because understanding the Book and the Sunnah depends on it.
- On the attribution to ‘Umar: Islamqa answer 301510 grades the widely circulated wording weak. The letter to Abu Musa al-Ash‘ari is in Musannaf Ibn Abi Shaybah.
The Qur’an word counts
- Computed from the Quranic Arabic Corpus morphology, ranking every word in the Qur’an by how often it appears, then accumulating the share of the Book covered.
- A word counts as covered only when every stem inside it is known. Prefixes and suffixes are excluded from the ranking.
The review ladder
- Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted and Rohrer (2006), a review of 317 experiments on distributed practice, and the finding that the useful gap widens the longer you want to keep something.
- The forgetting curve itself has been measured since the 1880s. The figure on that page is illustrative, not a plot of your memory in particular.
On naming no materials
- This guide recommends no course, no syllabus and no titles, which is deliberate. The right material depends on where you live, what you can afford and who is teaching you, and it is a decision to make with a teacher rather than with a book.
- The order of the six steps follows the sequence common to the classical Arabic sciences: sound and script, then the sentence, then the verb and its patterns, then the endings, then reading at length, then rhetoric.
On promising no timescales
- Earlier drafts of this guide carried an hour count for each step. We removed it. Learners arrive at very different speeds for reasons no book can see, and a timetable that turns out to be wrong becomes a reason to give up rather than a reason to continue.
- Arabic text follows the Uthmani script of the Tanzil Project. English renderings of the ayat are given for meaning in the Saheeh International register, and should not replace the Arabic in worship or formal study.
Keep this guide
Print it, write on it, pass it to somebody who has been meaning to start. When you want the part a book cannot do, your teacher is at mytijarah.co.uk.