It was a real blow when I realised I had wasted literally thousands of pounds and hundreds of hours on Arabic courses and, years of study later, I still hadn’t achieved my outcome of understanding the Quran. That’s because I didn’t know the 3 secrets you’re about to discover in this article.

But first, let me tell you…

Where My Urge to Learn Quranic Arabic Came From

My parents, like most parents of my generation, made me go to a Maulvi Saab every weekend morning when I was a kid, even though I didn’t understand a word of what I was reciting in the Quran. Even as a child, it was off-putting and frustrating to be forced to read a book, without understanding it. In fact, it made me want to rebel.

After all, we were taught French in school so we could read French books, so why was I reading this book without understanding it?

It turns out that my instinct as a child was correct, and the way we were being taught was counter – intuitive. So, when I finished school, the first thing I did right after my A-Levels was to find the ‘best’ Arabic courses that were out there. I wanted to find out what Allah was really saying to me in the Quran. And, I wanted to know for myself that the Extreme activities I saw on TV were disgusting to Allah.

I enrolled in two courses that Summer, a grammar course and an ‘intensive Arabic and Islamic Studies’ course. They were both great, and in many ways whet my appetite for more Quran, but certainly didn’t satisfy my hunger to understand the Quran in Arabic.

A couple of years later, having forgotten almost everything I learned on those courses and having mistakenly accepted that I couldn’t understand Quranic Arabic as a spare-time hobby, I took it a step further – I changed my degree course from medicine to Arabic (yes, you read that right and no, I don’t want to go back). I figured, if I do a degree in Arabic, and if I do well in it, then surely I’ll be able to read the Quran and understand it…

You can imagine my surprise 3 years into a four year degree, after spending a year in an Arab country, when not only did I not understand all the Quran, but it also became clear to me that even if I got a first class degree at one of the top universities in the UK for Arabic, I still wouldn’t reach my goal!

This freaked me out! So I did some more in-depth research to find out exactly what resources were needed to understand the Quran. I got all the self-study guides I could find, did a load of online research, spoke with people who had already ‘incidentally’ achieved the goal I wanted, and within the next few weeks, I achieved the dream. And here is how…

How To Understand Quranic Arabic Quickly And Easily

Here are the top ways to study Arabic for the specific outcome of understanding the Quran:

1. Only study basic grammar.

Most people will tell you that you need to spend your whole life studying Arabic grammar to appreciate the beauty of the Quran. What they don’t tell you is that you can know enough grammar to string the Arabic sentences together, without needing an English translation in only a few hours of focused study.

There are many books and courses out there that teach exactly this, and you can study them on your own.

2. Only learn Arabic to English.

Because your goal is to just understand what the Quran says, you can save yourself at least 50% of your study time by following this golden rule. You don’t need to know the Arabic for ‘take me to the sheesha bar’, because that is superfluous to your goal of understanding the Quran. You only need to learn vocabulary, and do exercises, that get you to translate Arabic sentences into English, not the other way around.

3. Only learn the vocabulary that’s actually in the Quran

This one takes the biscuit. You will save yourself literally hundreds of hours of personal study if you. Avoid learning any words that are not in the text of the Quran itself. How do you do this? Simply by taking all of your vocabulary lists directly from the Quran, or by using ready-made resources that have Quran-only vocab lists in them. In fact, only 300 Arabic words account for 70% of the words in the whole Quran, because they are repeated most frequently.

***Bonus Secret***

4. Use what you already know as your text book.

If you’re a western Muslim, you probably already know a lot more Arabic than you give yourself credit for. You know the contents of prayer, you probably know some Quran already, and if you don’t you’re probably going to learn them by rote soon anyway. Use that as the basic text book. Don’t bother with Rosetta Stone or any other language course, with its own text books. They are a waste of your time.

If you want to know the quickest, simplest, most effective way to achieve all your Quran goals and connect with Allah (swt) like never before, click here to check out the Free Quran For Busy People Web-Class.

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