Learn Arabic to comfortable beginner in twelve months
A year at 40 minutes a day gets a determined English speaker to read short Modern Standard Arabic passages and hold halting conversations in a chosen dialect. Roughly 240 hours total. Arabic is two decisions disguised as one: which dialect, and how seriously to take MSA. Pick early.
12 months · ~240 hours · read MSA news headlines, hold a 10-minute dialect conversation
1.The Arabic alphabet — first
Twenty-eight letters, four shapes each depending on position in the word. It looks insurmountable for a week, then it clicks. Use Madinah Arabic's free reading course — short, paced for absolute beginners, audio for every letter. Drill thirty minutes a day for three weeks. Skip transliteration immediately after; reading Arabic in Latin letters delays your real reading and trains the wrong instincts. This is the foundation everything else sits on.
Free
Madinah Arabic reading course →2.Madinah Arabic — Book 1
Free, structured, and the most widely respected self-study Arabic course in English. Book 1 covers core MSA grammar — gender, nominal sentences, attached pronouns, the dual — through short conversational passages with audio. Work through it lesson by lesson over six to ten months. This builds the MSA spine that lets dialect study later make sense. Most learners who try to skip MSA and start with dialect plateau within a year.
Free; optional 1-on-1 tutors $15–25/hour
Madinah Arabic Book 1 →3.italki — dialect tutor
Pick one dialect — Egyptian if you want film and TV access, Levantine if you want the politest neutral, Gulf if you have specific business or family ties. Book a community tutor in that dialect for 30-minute lessons twice a week. Tell them you've studied MSA and want spoken practice. Same tutor every time. This is where the language stops being a script and starts being yours.
~$10–20/hour, pay per lesson
italki Arabic tutors →If this doesn't fit you
If you only need to communicate in one country and don't care about reading the news, skip MSA and replace step 2 with the Pimsleur Egyptian Arabic course or a dedicated dialect tutor on italki from day one. You'll arrive at conversational speech faster but you'll never read signs, menus or formal writing — those are all in MSA. Defensible if your goal is purely spoken interaction in one place.
Why this path
Arabic's reputation for difficulty is mostly the script and the diglossia — the gap between formal written Arabic (MSA) and spoken dialects. Madinah Arabic solves both honestly: it teaches the script seriously, then gives you a Book 1 that has been used by self-learners for thirty years and is still the cleanest free MSA course online. The mistake almost everyone makes is jumping straight to a "learn Egyptian Arabic in 30 days" app and never developing reading. Reading is the leverage. Italki is where the dialect lives.