Robert Lane Greene, a fellow who has learned Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese, describes how difficult it is to learn Arabic in I’m Trying To Learn Arabic — Why’s it taking so long?:
There are just 28 letters, and it does not take long to get used to writing and reading right-to-left. (Though it still feels odd to open my book from what seems like the back.) Most of the letters have four different forms, depending on whether they stand alone or come at the beginning, middle, or end of a word. Even then, so far so good. But in Arabic, as in Hebrew, people don’t include most vowels when writing. Maktab, or “office,” is just written mktb. Vowels are included as little marks above and below in beginning textbooks, but you soon have to get used to doing without them.
Arabic appears to be quite…idiosyncratic:
It has a dual number, so nouns and verbs must be learned in singular, dual, and plural. A present-tense verb has 13 forms. There are three noun cases and two genders. Some European languages have just as many forms to keep track of, but in Arabic the idiosyncrasies can be mind-boggling. When Karam explains that numbers are marked for gender — but most numbers take the opposite gender from the word they are modifying — we students stare at each other in slack-jawed solidarity. When we learn that adjectives modifying nonhuman plurals always have a feminine singular form — meaning that “the cars are new” comes out as “the cars, she are new” — I can hear heads banging on the desks around me. I want to do the same.
And, of course, Arabic isn’t really one language:
The State Department reckons that it takes 80 to 88 weeks (roughly a year in the classroom full-time and a year in-country) to get to a level 3 on a 5-point scale in Modern Standard Arabic, the language I am learning. But there’s a twist. MSA has about the same role in the Arab world that Latin had in medieval Europe: It’s the language of writing, religion, and formal speeches, but it is no one’s native spoken language any more. Arabic has long since become a series of “dialects,” which are actually more like separate languages, as many varieties are mutually incomprehensible.