How to Find the Root of a Word
clevermizo said:
To be quite honest, when I started learning Arabic I didn't really bother paying attention to roots so much. I just learned words, and learned basics of grammar. After more time and practice, I learned more about roots and then they just started being apparent to me
According to my own experience with Arabic, the better you know the morphological build-up of the verb and (especially) its nominal derivations, the better you'll come to grips with the idiosyncratic way most Arabic dictionaries are organized.
Obviously, clevermizo started rather early studying Arabic, and his language learning methodology is probably influenced by that. I think age is a crucial factor in choosing how to learn a language – if not outright how it is possible to learn a language! You would tend to learn written Chinese in a radically different way when you are 40 from when you are 20. I don't think Arabic is basically different in that respect.
My point is that when you are 20 you learn the drudgery part of a language (like vocabulary!) without asking too many questions. 
When you are 40 – not to mention when you are 56! – you'll tend to view things in a mirror of already acquired knowledge : You use logics, you apply your deduction skills, you compare with other languages – you desperately want to see a system. This search for structure pays off when you discover that Chinese characters can be analyzed and Arabic words can be ..."root extracted" and then rebuilt according to a particularly subtle system. You don't need to "just learn words", as clevermizo advocates. Nothing wrong with the latter approach – you'd better learn a lot of them! – but having reached a certain age, you just can't expect your brain to digest the first 500 words without any notions of structure.
I am not a young man either, and I do have some experience in language learning. The surprisingly positive thing is that age basically is of very little importance provided you find a methodology which suits you. I started myself with Arabic when I was very young, but subsequently left it for more than 10 years. Already at the point when I eventually resumed it, I had a craving for structure. But I was lucky. In the meantime I had built up a reference which proved infallibly useful: Turkish. For some time Ottoman Turkish and Classical Arabic nourished each other – two "dead languages" competing for favour in terms of endless comparisons between loanwords and words of origin.
Back to the ...root of the problem.
With Arabic roots comprising "week letters" you'll have a serious problem unless you are not familiar with the general theory of Arabic nominal morphology. Surveys (and mnemonics) like those of Abu Bishr are very useful indeed, but I think every good grammar of Classical Arabic – I have got three myself – all contain such information. Only, you can never get enough of it! –like with all good things.
Still I may "extract" a wrong root when trying to find a word in my main dictionary of Arabic, the English version of Wehr, probably the best on the market. But mind you, even an educated Arab might experience the same problem – exactly like an educated Chinese whom you ask for the radical of a "non-analyzable" character. And the reason for their bewilderment concerning their own language is, of course, that natives don't need to "extract" roots or radicals; they already know the word! We need a method to proceed to the dictionary – even if we are advanced students.
Good luck, Fredsie!
How to Find the Root of a Word
Source: https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/root-extraction-determining-the-root-of-a-word.764563/