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Knowing Farsi (or perhaps Urdu) will not help you with Arabic or Hebrew comprehension. There are "loan" words and constructs which help indeed but they don't co

Knowing Farsi (or perhaps Urdu) will not help you with Arabic or Hebrew comprehension. There are "loan" words and constructs which help indeed but they don't combine well with Farsi's. It helps you read it but it won't help you understand it or speak it correctly. I think your argument holds overall, in a sense that it's easier for a Farsi native to go to Arabic compared to a Chinese native.

danjac 6y ago
Sure: the point is that every language has its own set of difficulties and hurdles, and your existing knowledge of other languages may remove or lessen some of those hurdles. So a Farsi speaker will not need to learn the Arabic alphabet from scratch, but (other than loanwords) the languages' vocabularies are different. On the other hand, a Maltese speaker will need to learn the Arabic alphabet, but will find Arabic vocabulary familiar as both Maltese and Arabic are Semitic languages.