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As an Arabic speaker, I would say it's because of regional Arabic variants. For example, a Moroccan Arabic user would have trouble conversing with a Tunisian A
by Cyph0n 9y ago
As an Arabic speaker, I would say it's because of regional Arabic variants.
For example, a Moroccan Arabic user would have trouble conversing with a Tunisian Arabic user, even though both countries are in North Africa. On the other hand, a Saudi Arabic user likely wouldn't even be able to tell Moroccan Arabic from Tunisian Arabic[1], let alone understand a Moroccan or Tunisian Arabic speaker!
The further east/west you go, the more differences arise (pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar), and the harder it becomes for Arabic users to understand one another. But it can get even more hairy: in some cases, Arabic users from the same country can face trouble understanding one another in day-to-day speech.
Given that the goal of an FSO is to understand as much of a language as possible (I assume?), learning Arabic becomes a much more difficult task. If the goal was just to learn MSA (Modern Standard Arabic), which is the formal and written form of Arabic, then I think it would fall under the same category as Hebrew. But MSA can only take you so far and won't really help you integrate with the local population.
[1] Middle Eastern TV channels (e.g., Al Jazeera) typically include on-screen captions in MSA if the speaker is using an "unintelligible" dialect such as Moroccan Arabic.
- United857 9y agoSame issue exists with Chinese and the various dialects.
- gnulinux 9y agoI don't know anything about Arabic but can't see how this can affect English speakers learning rate. This same situation exist in almost every large country. German, for example, can have different phonology and cases based on region. Similarly, Russian too. Turkish pronunciation changes very heavily based on region.
- Grue3 9y agoI have never had any trouble understanding anyone speaking Russian from any part of the country. The differences in dialects are hardly noticeable, and these days almost non-existent (probably due to Soviet standardization efforts). The most prominent difference is probably pronouncing unstressed "o" as "a" (akanie, this is considered "correct" pronounciation) or as "o" (okanie).
- pandaman 9y agoWhen I just began speaking English more or less fluently I had no problem with American English but British just sounded like a different language to me. I had to watch any movie with British English with subtitles. Nowadays I have to make an effort to recognize British accent otherwise it sounds no different than American. I imagine different regional accents in Russian could be the same for non-native speakers. What a native speaker does not even notice could be completely unintelligible for somebody with just few hundred hours of studying the language.
- Cyph0n 9y agoNot sure about any of those languages, but what I can tell you is learning multiple Arabic variants is almost equivalent to learning multiple Romance languages. It's not just phonology or vocabulary.