It is the week before Christmas and my last lesson of the year finished about an hour ago. A pot of tea, a quiet house for the first time in months. Every December I sit down and take stock of what I have actually learnt from my students, rather than what I thought I was teaching them. This year surprised me in several ways. Some surprises were small, some have genuinely changed how I plan to work in 2026.
I thought adults would be the hardest. They weren't.
When I started private teaching, I assumed the adults would struggle more than the teenagers. Busy lives, rusty study habits, a fear of sounding foolish. That has not been the case. My adult students have been, with very few exceptions, my most committed learners. They come prepared. They do the reading I suggest. They ask questions that make me go away and think. The honest difference is motivation. An adult who chooses Arabic has already asked themselves why. A fourteen-year-old doing it because a parent signed them up is a different conversation.
The students who sang made faster progress
This one caught me off guard. Two of my students this year, both beginners, made noticeably quicker progress than peers at the same stage. The thing they had in common was music. One listens to Fairuz while cooking. The other had started following an Egyptian singer on YouTube. They were soaking up rhythm and pronunciation without realising. I have started recommending music as homework now, which feels a bit cheeky, but the evidence is plain.
"An adult who chooses Arabic has already asked themselves why. That question does half the work for them."
Progress is not a straight line and I should stop pretending it is
I used to draw little progress ladders for new students. Week one, week four, month three, month six. I have quietly stopped. Real progress comes in plateaus and bursts. A student will feel stuck for five weeks, convinced they are getting nowhere, and then in one lesson everything clicks and they read a whole paragraph aloud. The ladder gives them false hope at the bottom and false panic in the middle. Now I tell them honestly: there will be weeks when nothing seems to move, and those weeks are doing more than you think.
The script fear is overblown, the grammar fear is underblown
Everyone worries about the Arabic script before they start. Within a month, most students are fine. What catches them out later is the grammar, which I should probably warn people about more. The verb system, the construct state, the way adjectives behave when they meet a definite noun, these are the real climbs. I spent a lot of this year rewriting my intermediate materials to front-load the tricky grammar earlier, in small doses, rather than letting it pile up at month six.
Heritage learners carry something extra
I have taught more heritage learners this year than ever before. Second and third generation, mostly. Adults who grew up hearing Arabic at home but never properly learnt it. What I did not expect was the emotional weight they bring. There is grief in it sometimes. Grief for a grandparent they could not speak to properly, a country they never quite felt they belonged to. Arabic is not a neutral subject for these students. I have had to slow down and listen more. A lesson that runs late because someone needs to talk about their father is not a lesson wasted.
The Lebanese word that kept coming up
One phrase surfaced more than any other in my lessons this year: ya3ni (يعني), meaning "I mean" or "that is to say". Students latch onto it because it buys them thinking time in conversation, the same way we use "like" or "you know" in English. By November I was hearing it in almost every lesson. I am going to start teaching filler words sooner, because they do something powerful. They make you sound like a speaker of the language, not a translator running a sentence through your head.
What I am changing in 2026
A few things. First lessons will now include a short listening exercise, because listening has been the underrated skill all year. Grammar will arrive earlier and in smaller pieces. I am also going to be firmer about homework, gently. The students who did ten minutes a day outside lessons made roughly twice the progress of those who did nothing between sessions. I always knew that, but this year the gap was wider than I expected, and I owe it to new students to tell them that plainly from lesson one.
And the thing that has not changed
I still love this job. Teaching Arabic to adults who chose it voluntarily, in their own living rooms, on a weekday evening after work, is a privilege. Every so often someone sends me a voice note from a holiday in Jordan or a family dinner in Lebanon, mangling their grammar, sounding delighted with themselves. Those messages are why I keep doing this. Roll on 2026.
If you have been thinking about starting, January is as good a month as any. I offer a free thirty-minute taster, no pressure, just a conversation about what you are hoping to get to. Book a taster and we will take it from there.