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What makes Arabic difficult? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Muz9 Diglot Groupie Netherlands Joined 5523 days ago 84 posts - 112 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Somali | Message 1 of 53 10 October 2009 at 11:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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Why do people claim that Arabic is so difficult?
Every time I try to look up Arabic courses online etc, I come across people that seem to be terrified by this language (as in difficulty). Why is this, can anyone elaborate on this? Will Arabic be substantially easier to learn if you already speak an Afro-Asiatic language? Many words in Somali are just derived from Arabic (Lakin – But, Mustaqbal – Future, Al Baab – Door etc etc). I hope this makes things easier. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| snoppingasusual Quadrilingual Hexaglot Groupie Lebanon Joined 5566 days ago 49 posts - 65 votes Speaks: Arabic (Egyptian), French*, English*, Arabic (Written)*, Arabic (Levantine)*, Spanish | Message 2 of 53 11 October 2009 at 3:18am | IP Logged | ||
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This is also quite confusing for me. People say that the deletion of the short vowels is a reason for Arabic being so difficult, but I disagree. After all, with a little bit of practice, you can easily pronounce the word correctly.
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| Saif Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5611 days ago 122 posts - 208 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Levantine)*, French | Message 3 of 53 11 October 2009 at 4:33am | IP Logged | ||
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It's an unfamiliar language which makes it difficult. Arabic uses a root system that's different from what English speakers are used to. As you may know, mostly 3-letter roots are used to construct words (Indo-European tends to use a 2-root system). Semitic languages are almost mathematical in the way words are formed, which is a good thing if you can think in those terms. The writing system is intimidating for most learners because it's so unfamiliar. Vowels are usually not written, so you have to figure out the appropriate vowels based on context. The grammatical structure is completely different as well. It's logical, but tough. Another obstacle is the huge vocabulary that has no relation to Latin-based languages. A lot of time must be devoted to learning the alphabet, writing system, grammar, and vocabulary.
You also have to deal with the difficult pronunciation. Many of the sounds are unusual for English speakers to pronounce. It takes time to train your mouth to produce a lot of the sounds. Remember that the spoken "street" language is different from the formal form. There are variations from the Gulf to the Levant to Egypt to North Africa. You have to make sure you're consistent. Arabic presents many challenges, but I think it's worthwhile to learn. On the bright side, it's not as hard as Chinese or Japanese! Edited by Saif on 11 October 2009 at 4:34am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| pohaku Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5650 days ago 192 posts - 367 votes Speaks: English*, Persian Studies: Arabic (classical), French, German, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 4 of 53 11 October 2009 at 6:03am | IP Logged | ||
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My study partner and I are now just over 100 days of reading in our Arabic studies. It's easier for us than it would be for many because we (both native English speakers) know classical Persian quite well, which has essentially the same alphabet and a huge volume of Arabic loan-words. For over 100 days, we've read a short passage of Alf Layla wa Layla (1001 Nights) and we're doing pretty well. We check ourselves against Lane's translation (or sometimes one of the others; Lane doesn't have the story we're on now, about the king and his falcon). We're actually learning the classical pronounciation, in which many of the meaningful morphemes (case endings, person endings for verbs, and such, not to mention the short vowels) are not indicated in writing. The difficult part is that one needs to learn those things and, yet, they're just not there on the page.
I think it's also difficult for speakers of many other languages to get used to Arabic sounds and even more difficult to grasp the way these unfamiliar sounds, which help to make up the triliteral roots that are the heart of the language, become transformed by the changes that produce various verb conjugations, noun derivatives, adjectives, etc., from the roots. It's not so hard, for example, to use a glottal stop; we have them in English. But when that glottal stop becomes a major player in these transformations on a par with "real" sounds (to our ears) like "b" and "k," that can be hard to deal with. My impression so far is that the myriad transformations of Arabic roots make English "ring, rang, rung" seem like child's play. I try to imagine how satisfying it will be when these transformations become more comfortable for me, so that I can start to feel the beauty of the system, instead of just intellectually appreciating it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6049 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 5 of 53 11 October 2009 at 7:20am | IP Logged | ||
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Looking at the script, it seems more scary than any other. At least in Chinese script you can make out the symbols, even if you don't know what they mean. However in Arabic script, it seems to me (the uninitiated) that it is a series of squiggly lines with some random dots thrown in.
I am not saying the script actually IS more difficult in the end, mind you, it just really seems that way to me. How long did it take you learners to read the script relatively well and get used to it? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| pohaku Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5650 days ago 192 posts - 367 votes Speaks: English*, Persian Studies: Arabic (classical), French, German, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 6 of 53 11 October 2009 at 7:28am | IP Logged | ||
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The script, per se, is not very hard at all, in my opinion. Maybe harder than Cyrillic (for someone used to the Roman alphabet), but not that much. The difficulty is in the ways it's used, learning how to put in the missing short vowels, learning how to put in the ezafe (in Persian) or the various missing morphemes in Arabic. That could take a lot of time to become second nature, a year or two, rather than weeks or months. Worse, Persian books are often printed and edited rather casually, so it's sometimes hard to tell (unless you really know the language) where one word ends and another starts. So, it's not so much the alphabet, it's the way it's used. Arabic script, however, is certainly easier than Japanese or Chinese scripts. Don't let it daunt you!
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| YoshiYoshi Senior Member China Joined 5530 days ago 143 posts - 205 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 7 of 53 11 October 2009 at 8:15am | IP Logged | ||
First, the Arabic alphabet (cursive script) usually seems rather difficult to be distinguished easily from one another, especially for those beginners and when the calligraphy looks varied, tricky and small on the screen or in the books. Second, there's no doubt that Arabic is wholly different from Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Altaic, or any other languages, in terms of grammatical difficulties and pronunciation (short vowels), of course, I think getting used to the writing direction (from right to left) may take time as well. Last but not least (IMHO, no offence!), if you weren't Muslims, perhaps Arabic wouldn't be an amazing bargain to pick up, unless you had to communicate with Arabians quite often. And what's more, unlike Romance or Germanic languages, the only added benefit you could get from mastering Arabic might be the short cut to learning Hebrew, though the Hebrew alphabet is very different from Arabic. And besides MSA, the learners would have to learn at least one of the dialects such as Gulf, Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, and so on. In China, there are also some different dialects/languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Minnanese, Wunese, etc which were largely derived from classical Chinese, but as a whole, Mandarin is the most useful official language of both Mainland China and Taiwan, actually you don't need to learn their dialects to have a talk with those, for example, whose native language is Wunese (Shanghainese) or Minnanese, though it'd be better to learn some Cantonese if you wanted to travel around Hong Kong and Macao. Frankly, I really feel frustrated with the fact that MSA is almost useless for daily conversation, and none of the Arabic dialects (maybe Gulf?) could play an important role as a lingua franca in the Arabian world, just as the position that Mandarin stands in China. Sometimes, people would hesitate about which Arabic dialect they should choose to learn, especially when they (apart from language enthusiasts) didn't have a clear goal or destination in mind to learn Arabic. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Orient Newbie Australia Joined 5525 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Arabic (classical) | Message 8 of 53 11 October 2009 at 9:17am | IP Logged | ||
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Arabic is difficult for an English speaker, but is made easy because it is so important,
I mean as the language of the Quran and the classical standard of the Arab world. Because of this people put a lot of energy and time into creating online materials, freely accessible. Christians are also keen to produce online audio of the arabic translation of the Bible (check out arabbible.com). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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