I imagine Chinese would be a lot harder. With Arabic, it's a total of 28 letters with more or less 3 different wants of writing them, giving a total of 84 possible glyphs. On top of this there are various accents that can be placed on every letter. In essence, it's not that much more complicated than some sort of Latin alphabet (i.e Spanish or Italian).

The process I used was to learn a new letter everyday (with its three combinations) then found a local Lebanese church that had Arabic classes and joined up.

I was a lot better than everyone else, because I went in with prior knowledge, so I was always at least several lessons ahead which allowed me to utilise my time with the teacher to ask questions on specific things rather than just trying to keep up with the core coursework.