linguist bangs head over Arabic

And he says that the script isn't even the tough part:

Arabic has an alphabet, so it's easier than, say, Chinese, which has a set of thousands of characters. There are just 28 letters, and it does not take long to get used to writing and reading right-to-left. (Though it still feels odd to open my book from what seems like the back.) Most of the letters have four different forms, depending on whether they stand alone or come at the beginning, middle, or end of a word.

It doesn't feel odd to me, because I've dealt with Hebrew. But I'm here to tell you that, even with a table of all four forms in front of me, I still couldn't figure out what most of the letters were on the title page of a book in Farsi (or at least, I was told it was in Farsi) that I was once trying to catalog. Farsi, though it uses the Arabic script, has a few additional letters and different forms, but not so many as to leave me as totally at sea as I was.

For descriptive cataloging, you don't need to understand the language, but you do need to be able to read and transliterate the alphabet. I can read Cyrillic print slowly but accurately; I can deal with Hebrew print. (I can't read it without vowel signs unless I know the words, and I don't know a lot of Hebrew words, but if I have an accurate transliteration of something in front of me, I can tell quickly if it matches the book in hand.)

But the Arabic alphabet ... forget it.