The second top reason people gave for why they still haven’t learnt Arabic yet, is that they found it really difficult. Nouns, verbs, gerunds, accusative, genitive, nominative cases—they didn’t even know this in their own language yet they were having to learn Arabic grammar in English.
The problem is that many courses put a lot of focus on grammar before you’ve even learnt how to understand and speak. And because of this, most people find it really difficult to learn Arabic—You’ve already learnt a language before; You learnt your mother tongue like English.
You didn’t know English when you were in your mother’s womb! You had to learn to speak it. You didn’t learn about nouns and verbs, accusative, genitive, nominative tenses as a baby, did you?
You saw objects, heard words, began to understand these words, started to use them (sometimes incorrectly and then you’d be corrected). It was natural—You were immersed in that language. And this is how we believe you can make learning Arabic so much easier than how many courses teach it.
Firstly, you start thinking in the new language right from the start. You hear words over and over again. You connect them to objects by looking at pictures.
You see a picture of a book and say, “Hadha kitab”
You see a picture of a pen and say, “Hadha qalam”
In your mind, you link the word qalam to the picture of the pen, rather than to the English word “pen”. So you won’t be translating in your head. You’ll actually be thinking in Arabic. Once you learn physical objects, you then move onto abstract concepts like hunger, thirst and so on.
And you do this by having someone guide you and hold your hand while you learn—just the way you learnt your first language when you were a baby. By listening, understanding, repeating, getting corrected and so on.
When the right method is used, you can learn Arabic quickly and with ease—without all the struggles of complex grammar. By the way, grammar IS important but only after you have an initial base; not right at the start.