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Arabic 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 alon
by miked 17y ago
Arabic 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.