3 ms·

What makes me skeptical, is they rate Arabic as much more difficult than Hebrew, two languages with some mutual intelligibility.

• TomK32 9y ago
  Do they include the script? I bet the Hebrew script is much easier to learn than the Arabic.
  • dirktheman 9y ago
    They're about the same. To the untrained eye, Arabic looks like a lot of scribbles while with the Hebrew script it's easy to distinguish separate letters. That would make you think it's easier to learn Hebrew. In reality there are a lot of similarities between the two languages (they're both Semitic), not just in vocabulary but also in grammar. Arabic may have a different way of writing the same letters, but if you study Arabic for a while it's not so hard to distinguish between the separate letters.
• dang 9y ago
  I would think that too, if not for this excellent comment downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15822024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15822024.
  • mchaver 9y ago
    Adding to that, I believe that Modern Hebrew has lots of loan words from Russian and probably quite a few from English.
    • pvg 9y ago
      That probably isn't going to make a huge difference - English speakers don't get much of a leg-up on French despite the gobs of shared vocabulary.
• ekianjo 9y ago
  modern hebrew is an invented languages that dates from one century ago if I remember correctly so not sure how much similarity to Arabic can be claimed.
  • reuven 9y ago
    Modern Hebrew is indeed about a century old. But a huge proportion of its vocabulary and grammar and based on the Bible, and many centuries of Jewish religious and legal writing. Don't forget that for 2,000 years, Jews have prayed, studied, written, and communicated in Hebrew. It's easier for a native Hebrew speaker to read the Bible or rabbinic literature than for a native English speaker to read Shakespeare. Moreover, a good grounding in Biblical and rabbinic Hebrew grammar and vocabulary makes modern Hebrew far easier to understand. To say that modern Hebrew is "made up" exaggerates the degree to which Hebrew exists on a continuum. It was revived as a spoken, day-to-day language used for non-religious, non-legal affairs. But there are more than 2,000 years of Hebrew documents out there, and they contribute massively to everything from idioms to grammar to vocabulary -- along with many modern terms from English, Russian, French, Arabic, and other languages.
• Broken_Hippo 9y ago
  I was thinking arabic had crazy strict grammar rules that hebrew doesn't have. That makes learning the language harder.