Learning Arabic can be very beneficial to you, whether from a personal perspective or from a professional perspective. However, time is money and we all would like to know how much does it exactly take to learn Arabic.

If you really want to learn quickly, then I would suggest you go for Multibhashi online classes that have reputed trainers with a very low starting price. Learning a language is investing in yourself and Multibhashi helps you with that.

Well, it depends!

Okay now, don’t come to beat me up. It really does depends, mainly on 4 factors-

1. Your Native Language- if it’s a language such as Urdu or Hindu, which contains a lot of similarities to Arabic, you will face a lot less difficulty while learning. On the other hand, if it’s English or German, there’s almost nothing in common which makes learning Arabic a tad bit harder.
2. How much time you are dedicating to study- Obviously the more you study, the more you will learn.
3. What is your end goal?- Suppose you only want to learn Arabic because you are traveling to Cairo, then you needn’t study so much. Just basic phrases and words will suffice but if you are learning it because you want to be a translator, then you need to be fluent in this language.
4. How you are learning- Whether you are studying for 5 minutes every day from Duolingo or taking lessons from private tutors, it all makes a difference in how fast you learn.

A combination of these factors decides how much it is going to take to learn Arabic. However, if you want a rough figure without considering any of the above factors then, you should thank FSI. 

Foreign Service Institute measures how much it takes to learn a specific language. It has divided a no. of languages into different types based on their closeness to English.

These types are- 

Language Group I

• Languages Closely Related to English
• Afrikaans, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, French, Haitian Creole, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish
• 23-24 Weeks (575-600 Hours)

Language Group II

• Languages similar to English
• German
• 30 weeks (750 hours)

Language Group III

• Languages with linguistic and/or cultural differences from English
• Indonesian, Malaysian, Swahili
• 36 Weeks (900 Hours)

Language Group IV

• Languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English
• Amharic, Bengali, Burmese, Croatian, Czech, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Mongolian, Nepali, Pashto, Persian (Dari, Farsi, Tajik), Pilipino, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Thai, Tamil, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese
• 44 Weeks (1,100 Hours)

Language Group V

• Exceptionally difficult languages for native English speakers
• Arabic, Cantonese Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean
• 88 Weeks (2,200 Hours)

Therefore, according to FSI findings, Arabic is in Language Group V and it will take you around 2,200 hours to learn it.