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Arabic is a hell of language to learn. Even as an Egyptian born in a semi-Arabic speaking house, and in the middle of trying to teach myself the language, I'm f
by kyro 17y ago
Arabic is a hell of language to learn. Even as an Egyptian born in a semi-Arabic speaking house, and in the middle of trying to teach myself the language, I'm finding Arabic really difficult to learn. My two main problems are: a) Many words are not actually written as one word, and so you might have 2 or 3 separated strings of letters that are meant to be read altogether as one, which is ridiculously confusing - and - B) Arabic is commonly written with the vowels omitted. Most Arabic words have a set of unique root consonants, usually 3 or 4 consonants, that help you identify the word you're reading. So they'll eliminate the vowels because the root consonants and modifiers should be sufficient for word recognition. This probably makes reading script faster as there's less to process, and I'm sure it does, but as a beginner, it's tough.
- m0th87 17y agoAlso, Arabic calligraphy varies greatly, and just because you know one form doesn't enable you to read another. Perhaps cursive vs. print is similarly difficult for non-English speakers, but I feel as if Arabic's is especially difficult. After years of studying the language, I can hardly do anything with it.
- kyro 17y agoYeah, I should've included that as a third point. We get Arabic television stations at home that I'll watch to try to read headlines, etc, for practice, but the font changes so drastically from show to show that I often find some letters unrecognizable.
- netcan 17y agoWhat about the fact that the standard written/literary form is not what people actually speak? Arabic speakers seem so strict about the language. I would imagine that makes things hard.
- miked 17y agoArabic is a hell of language to learn. Even as an Egyptian born in a semi-Arabic speaking house...I'm finding Arabic really difficult to learn. You're not alone. The US Defense Language Institute teaches many languages, mostly to native English speakers. Of the languages they teach, Arabic takes the longest. It's a shame the article didn't list the number of weeks the DLI spends on each of the languages. It "only" covers a few dozen languages, but course length would be an excellent proxy for language difficulty for English speakers.
- cenazoic 17y agoAs a data point, I attended DLI in 1991-1992 for Russian. At the time the basic Russian class lasted for 47 weeks..5 days a week, 8 hours a day. If I remember correctly, Arabic was 63 weeks. DLI 'ranked' languages according to difficulty...categories (cats) I-V. Russian was a III. Arabic was cat IV. The only two cat V languages were English (for non-natives) and Japanese.