Questions No One Properly Answered When I Started Learning Arabic

Yesterday, during a meeting interpretation, the client heard my Arabic accent and asked, "Where did you learn?" I laughed and answered, "In the back seat of a Dubai taxi," and honestly, that's half true. As an interpreter, I'm used to switching between English, Urdu, and French, but Arabic turned me into an entirely different kind of beginner. So today, I want to get into the questions I was genuinely curious about when I first started learning Arabic, the ones I could never get a straight answer to anywhere.

"Should I learn MSA or a dialect?"

Post this question in an Arabic learning community and a war breaks out. I followed the advice to start with Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). I bought textbooks and downloaded apps. But in Dubai, the only times I actually used MSA were watching news broadcasts or reading official documents. To order coffee at a café, ask about spice prices at Deira Old Souk, or chat about the weather with a taxi driver, I needed Gulf dialect.

Here's what I think: if you're living in Dubai, grab Gulf dialect first and build up MSA slowly, focusing on reading and listening. Trying to perfect both at the same time is a fantasy for beginners. I spent my first three months buried in MSA grammar, only to sit there blankly, unable to understand a single word, when I was invited to a fellow interpreter's mother's house. The machboos I had that evening was delicious, but my pride took a hit.

"Should I learn the alphabet first, or can I jump straight into conversation?"

I figured that since I'm an interpreter and comfortable with spoken language, I could start with conversation. Big mistake. With Arabic, if you don't know the script, you hit a wall at some point. Restaurant menus, road signs, government forms. Dubai is pretty good about having English alongside Arabic, but that's actually a trap. Relying on English is so convenient that you lose all motivation to learn Arabic script.

I ended up doing both in parallel. Every morning, I practised writing Arabic script for 15 minutes before work, and at lunch, I practised ordering in Gulf dialect with a café employee near the office. The café worker, Abdullah, watched me come to the same café every day practising "wahed karak chai, min fadlik." At first he laughed, but eventually he started correcting my pronunciation. That was better than any app.

"Isn't learning a language easier if you're an interpreter?"

This is the question I get the most. Honestly, it's half right and half wrong. The framework for learning languages (picking up grammar patterns, categorising sounds, inferring meaning from context) definitely helps. But there are parts that are actually harder because I'm an interpreter. I know exactly how bad I am. In moments when a typical beginner would shrug and think "I got the point across, good enough," I'm fully aware that my tense was wrong and my gender agreement was off. That self-awareness makes it harder to open my mouth.

It took me a long time to get over this. I still can't say I've fully overcome it. But I did set a rule for myself: separate interpreter mode from learner mode. I don't use Arabic during work (I can't exactly subject clients to my beginner Arabic). Instead, outside of work, especially during Friday lunch when I wander around the Al Fahidi Historical District, I deliberately hold back on English and try speaking Arabic first. The shop owners' reactions are generally warm. Every now and then, when I get a "Habibi, not bad!" it's enough to carry me through the whole week.

"Are apps and self-study enough?"

Private Arabic tutoring in Dubai runs about 100 to 250 AED per hour, and for my first six months, I got by on apps and YouTube alone. It wasn't completely ineffective. It was enough for learning the alphabet and basic greetings. But when it came to the actual speed and contractions of Gulf dialect, and real conversations where the other person doesn't adjust to your level, self-study clearly had its limits.

I eventually started tutoring once a week, and the most useful thing my teacher did wasn't explaining grammar. It was making me a "list of expressions actually used in Dubai." A sentence like "ya akhi, wain aqrab farmasia" (bro, where's the nearest pharmacy) was a hundred times more useful in my daily life than the textbook's "ayna al-maktaba" (where is the library).

I'm still a beginner at Arabic. The pressure that comes with the title of interpreter makes it uncomfortable to admit sometimes, but what can you do. Just yesterday at the butcher shop, I asked for "zajaj" (glass) instead of "dajaj" (chicken), and the butcher and I had a good laugh. I think moments like that piling up is ultimately what learning a language is all about. At least the back seat of a taxi tuition is free.