<p>I was reading literary works towards the end of my first year of German (Der Richter und sein Henker). You won’t be there in Arabic because nothing literary is written in media Arabic or the local dialects and because it really is harder. Literary Arabic is like learning yet another version of Arabic. (Notice that according to the State Dept. Arabic is 4 times harder than French and 2 times harder than Russian.) I thought Chinese grammar was surprisingly easy, but since I could not deal with the tones at all, I never mastered it. I also never learned to read more than a couple hundred characters.</p>