Arabic — العربية
Fusha is nobody's mother tongue, and it is the only Arabic you have practised.
Modern Standard Arabic belongs to the newspaper, the bulletin and the contract. No child grows up speaking it. The Arabic said to you in Cairo, Beirut, Kuwait or Casablanca is a different spoken language in practice, and the years you spent on the written one bought you very little of it.
Every spoken sentence makes you choose a variety before you choose the words.
Two languages, one name
You studied Modern Standard Arabic and can read it. Nobody orders coffee in it. Speak fusha in a Cairo street and you sound like a newsreader; speak dialect in a formal meeting and you sound careless. Knowing which to reach for is its own skill.
Case endings you never had to pronounce
Unvowelled text lets you read for years without producing a single i'rab ending. In formal speech they come back — nominative, accusative, genitive, and the tanwin — decided in the half-second before the word leaves your mouth, along with when to drop them at a pause.
Numbers get the gender backwards
Three to ten take the opposite gender to the noun they count and a plural in the genitive; eleven to ninety-nine take a singular accusative. A price, a date, a phone number — all of it has to come out right while you are still talking.
Sounds that change the word
The pharyngeals ayn and ha, and the emphatics — sad, dad, ta, dha, said with the tongue pulled back — are not decoration. Sayf is a sword and sayf with a sad is summer; kalb is a dog and qalb, with the uvular qaf, is a heart. Gemination carries meaning too: darasa studied, darrasa taught.
Agreement that shifts with word order
Put the verb first and it stays singular however many people are doing the thing; put the subject first and it agrees in full. Non-human plurals take feminine singular agreement, so the books are 'she'. The dual is still there and still expected.
All five can be sat in fusha, and all five make you produce it out loud.
Every one of them keeps a section for speech, and that is where the marks go missing. In Arabic it is also where the variety is settled for you: fusha, live, with no second to check an ending. Formats and fees move, so the awarding body's current page is the one to trust.
ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI)
A live interview by phone with a certified tester, fifteen to thirty minutes, and the questions are chosen as you go rather than written down in advance. Bookable in Modern Standard Arabic; the regional varieties are rated on the ILR scale, not ACTFL's.
ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview — Computer (OPIc)
The same rating scale without a human on the line: twenty to forty minutes of prompts delivered by computer, answered into a microphone. You can replay a prompt once, and only in the five seconds after it ends.
CIMA — Certificat international de maîtrise en arabe (Institut du monde arabe)
Run by the Institut du monde arabe, mapped to the CEFR, Modern Standard Arabic only. The oral runs eleven minutes at most, face to face: a guided interview with no preparation, a role play with two minutes to think, then a monologue with none.
Hamza test — اختبار همزة (King Salman Global Academy for the Arabic Language)
Saudi Arabia's standardised test for non-native speakers, booked through Qiyas or an accredited centre abroad. The speaking part runs twenty minutes: you talk on a general topic or work through a simulated dialogue after a short preparation window.
ALPT — Arabic Language Proficiency Test (Arab Academy)
The speaking section only comes in the Comprehensive package, and it is a live video interview with a teacher, fifteen minutes at the least, opening with easy ground and pushing into opinion questions until you run out of road.
What are you practising for?
Start with ten minutes
Nothing to book, and a written report at the end of the first session.
Try 10 minutes freeA rehearsal, and its limits
No board recognises anything that happens here. A session ends in a number of our own, and it settles nothing about the certificate you are actually sitting for. It assumes the reading is already done, too: the fusha has to be in there for speech to be worth correcting. And the partner speaks a taught variety — nearer a patient colleague than anyone you will meet in a market.