Gateway to Arabic is a well-structured, progressive course that has been carefully designed to teach Arabic in a non-Arabic-speaking environment to learners from a broad age range. It is highly popular with evening and weekend madrasahs, Muslim schools, as well as with adult learners. As students progress in building up their knowledge of Arabic grammar and vocabulary, they are able to put into practice the skills they have acquired through written exercises, spoken passages of dialogue and comprehension exercises.

Book Five focuses on air travel, meals and medical matters. It builds upon the student's knowledge of first form verbs by introducing various defective forms (verbs containing one or more weak root letters). The book also extends the student's understanding of cardinal numbers into the thousands and suggests practical applications for their use.