I'm a native English speaker who's basically fluent in Mandarin. I've studied for 8 years and I live in China. It's my 4th foreign language. From what I know,

I'm a native English speaker who's basically fluent in Mandarin. I've studied for 8 years and I live in China. It's my 4th foreign language. From what I know, Arabic is about as far from English as Mandarin, so let me put in plainly: If you want to become fluent, expect to put in about a decade of work. This is not an easy language like French or Spanish which you'd be able to pick up by studying at home. You need to go live in an Arabic-speaking country. Ideally, find a native girlfriend / boyfriend there. When memorizing vocab, it's more efficient (for me, at least) to memorize for a day or two, then forget, then relearn a few more times than to try to keep a new word in my mind for a long time span. Forgetting and then relearning just seems to be the trick to shoring up long-term memory. I find I need to learn a new word an average of 4 or 5 times before it really sticks.