I started learning Arabic in 2013 with the curriculum of Al Arabiya Lin Nashieen. The curriculum has six books. Once I finished the first two in around 6 months, I made an attempt to read from the Quran and real Arabic books. I struggled like anything. I couldn’t decipher the texts. I thought had I finished the six books, I would’ve cracked the texts. 

I reverted to Lin Nashieen. I was a few lessons into the third book, someone advised me to adopt another curriculum Madina Arabic. It’s a shorter one with only three books. I switched and I finished the first two books in around 5 months. 

Again I made an attempt to read the real Arabic texts from the Quran, Hadith and different books. But no improvement at all. Whatever grammar rules I learnt through different lessons from the two different curricula couldn’t benefit me at all in decoding the real texts. At times I felt, once I saw the real texts, I never learnt Arabic.

Then I took a different approach. I’d read various small hadith texts and decode them. Initially I really broke my head while decoding the texts. But somehow I did stick to. Gradually I could decode better. I also attempted to decode the Quranic texts here and there. With time I grew more comfortable with different Arabic texts and I started attempting scholarly books as well.

One thing I grasp through my journey — A dull boring curriculum designed on Incremental Difficulty is not effective at all for your language learning. It doesn’t prepare you for the real Arabic books. Why?

There’s a huge divide between how we learn in class and how we learn in life. In class, we learn through curricula, but in life we learn, not through curricula, rather through situations and situational difficulties. While decoding a real Arabic text from the Quran or Hadith or any scholarly Arabic book, you cannot bring all the rules and structures you did learn in the class. So you will struggle like anything. The struggle is not that you don’t know, rather it’s that you know more than you require. The burden of knowledge comes crushing on you. 

The curriculum puts you into a structure that you struggle to get out of. Once you face challenges with a text, you keep on trying to recall all the grammar rules and meanings that limit your move-forward. You get confused and keep revising grammar rules that make you even more confused.

So what’s the best method to learn Arabic? Through fractals. What’s that?

Take a small Arabic text and decode. Don’t bother about grammar. Just keep taking texts and decoding. I tell you — with time you will grab vocabulary as well as grammar rules way way better.

Back in February 2021, I started an Arabic language course with a few students and adopted this method. Alhamdulillah, I saw progress in the students. Now they are much more comfortable with Arabic reading and understanding.