How to learn Arabic by reading

Modern Standard Arabic is the shared written language of the Arab world. Novels, newspapers, schoolbooks and the evening news use it from Morocco to Oman, even though everyday speech varies from country to country. Learn to read it and a whole literature opens up, from the Thousand and One Nights to Naguib Mahfouz, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988.

Arabic also has a reputation for difficulty, and much of that reputation comes from reading: a new script, words written without their vowels, and a grammar built on roots. Each of these is more systematic than it first looks, and each one gets easier with every page you read.

What makes Arabic hard to read

• The script. Twenty-eight letters, written right to left and joined within words, with up to four shapes each depending on position: ع on its own, عـ at the start of a word, ـعـ in the middle and ـع at the end. Several letters share a shape at the start or in the middle of a word and differ only in their dots: بـ, تـ, ثـ, نـ and يـ.
• Missing vowels. Ordinary Arabic text writes consonants and long vowels, but not short vowels. The letters كتب can be read kataba, “he wrote,” kutiba, “it was written,” or kutub, “books.” Fluent readers supply the vowels from grammar and context; learners need time, and texts with the vowels marked, to build that skill.
• Roots and patterns. Most words are built from a root of three consonants poured into a pattern. From ك-ت-ب (k-t-b, writing) come كتاب (kitāb, book), كاتب (kātib, writer), مكتب (maktab, office or desk), مكتبة (maktaba, library or bookshop) and مكتوب (maktūb, written, or a letter). Once you see the patterns, new words arrive half-understood.
• Small words attached. Conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns join the words around them: وبكتابه (wa-bi-kitābihi) is “and with his book,” written as a single word.
• Grammar you can only see with vowels. Arabic nouns have three cases, marked by short vowel endings that ordinary text leaves out. Narrative sentences often start with the verb: ذهب الولد, “the boy went,” is literally “went the boy.” And many plurals are “broken,” changing the inside of the word: كتاب, “book,” becomes كتب, “books”; ولد, “boy,” becomes أولاد, “boys.”
• Standard and spoken Arabic. Narration in novels is in Modern Standard Arabic, though some modern novelists write dialogue in a dialect. Learn MSA for reading, and add a dialect if you plan to talk with people every day.

For a first week with the Arabic alphabet, see our guide to learning a new script.

Arabic reading at each level

What the CEFR levels mean for Arabic text:

• A2, elementary. Fully vowelled text: every word carries its short vowels and case endings, so you can read aloud exactly what’s written. Short verbal sentences in the past and present, and the most common broken plurals.
• B1, intermediate. Still fully vowelled. Longer sentences joined with أنّ (“that”) and relative pronouns (الذي, التي), كان with a present-tense verb for past habits, and the most common derived verb forms.
• B2, upper intermediate. Closer to normal print, without full vowelling. The passive, verbal nouns (maṣdar), the derived verb forms used with confidence, and a wider vocabulary.
• C1, advanced. Close to the original, lightly condensed, printed the way Arabic books usually are. C2 is the complete text.

CEFR levels explained describes the scale in more detail.

The Arabian Nights at A2 and at B2

From the story of Ali Baba and the forty thieves, written for this page. At A2 the text is fully vowelled; at B2 it’s printed as most Arabic is, with a single vowel mark kept where the word would otherwise be ambiguous.

A2

قَالَ رَئِيسُ اللُّصُوصِ: «اِفْتَحْ يَا سِمْسِمُ». فَانْفَتَحَ بَابٌ فِي الصَّخْرَةِ.‏

The leader of the thieves said, “Open, Sesame.” And a door opened in the rock.

B2

اختبأ علي بابا بين أغصان شجرة، وراقب اللصوص الأربعين وهم يُدخلون أكياس الذهب إلى المغارة، ثم حفظ الكلمات السحرية التي تفتح بابها.‏

Ali Baba hid among the branches of a tree and watched the forty thieves carry sacks of gold into the cave, then memorized the magic words that open its door.

In the A2 sentence every mark is there: you can see that رَئِيسُ ends in -u because it’s the subject, and that بَابٌ is indefinite, bābun, “a door.” In the B2 sentence, notice the one mark that survives, on يُدخلون (yudkhilūn, “they bring in”). Without it, the word could be read يَدخلون (yadkhulūn, “they enter”). Notice too how Arabic treats the plural of things: in الكلمات السحرية التي تفتح, “the magic words that open,” the adjective, the relative pronoun and the verb are all feminine singular, because the plural refers to things rather than people.

A daily Arabic reading routine

1. Read vowelled text aloud. At A2 and B1, read a paragraph aloud before you listen. Vowelled text lets you check yourself against what’s written.
2. Then listen with the text highlighted. Hear where you were right and where you weren’t, especially on case endings and the sounds that don’t exist in English, like ع and the emphatic consonants.
3. Look for the root. When a word is new, find its three root letters. You’ll often know a cousin of the word already.
4. Tap only what blocks you. If you can follow the sentence, move on. Arabic vocabulary comes back in new forms, and each meeting makes the next one easier.

The principles of extensive reading, set out by Day and Bamford (1998, Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom), apply with special force to Arabic: easy material, lots of it, read for pleasure. Hard texts force you to decode word by word, while easy ones let you meet the same roots and patterns often enough to start reading fluently. Our guides to comprehensible input, reading while listening and the 98% rule go further.

Classics to start with

• The Arabian Nights has been told in Arabic for more than a thousand years. (Ali Baba and Aladdin joined the collection later, in the eighteenth century, through the French translator Antoine Galland, who heard them from a Syrian storyteller, Hanna Diyab.) The stories are short and self-contained, a good start at A2 or B1.
• Robinson Crusoe is all concrete, practical vocabulary: building, planting, sailing, surviving. Ideal at A2 and B1.
• Treasure Island is fast, vivid and full of dialogue.
• Around the World in Eighty Days passes through Suez and Aden on the way east, and its short chapters suit A2 and B1.
• The Count of Monte Cristo is a long, gripping B2 read.

Reading Arabic with Lexo

Lexo’s Arabic is Modern Standard Arabic, and it meets the vowel problem head on. At A2 and B1 every word is fully vowelled, so you read exactly what you’d hear; from B2 up, the text moves toward the way Arabic is normally printed. Pages read right to left and turn right to left, and you can enlarge the type when the vowel marks get small.

Tap any word and a card shows what it means in that sentence, its base form and its part of speech. That’s a real help in a language that attaches “and,” “with” and “his” to the word itself: tap وبكتابه and the card gives you its base form, كتاب, “book.” The card also spells the word out in Latin letters, vowels included, which helps most from B2 up, when the page itself leaves most vowel marks out. Idioms and set phrases are explained as units, each sentence can be translated into English at a tap, and you can save words to your Words list.

Every word can be played on its own, which helps with sounds like ع and ق, and the whole book is narrated, with different voices for different characters and the text highlighted word by word. Sentence-by-sentence mode is there for hard passages: one sentence, its audio, its translation.

You choose the level for each book, from A2 to C2. If you’re the first reader to ask for a book in Arabic at your level, Lexo writes the edition for you: chapter 1 is ready in a few minutes, the rest follows while you read, and you keep a dated “First edition” mark. Books download for offline reading, and there’s no account to create.

Arabic script and vocabulary reach far beyond Arabic: see Persian and Turkish. Hebrew, a Semitic relative, has a root system much like Arabic’s.

Lexo is coming soon to the App Store for iPhone and iPad. Get notified at launch.