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Why Arabic is hard to learn.

 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages Post Reply
11 messages over 2 pages: 1 2  Next >>
ozeri
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Israel
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 Message 1 of 11
31 August 2010 at 6:54pm | IP Logged 

Here is an article I just read,that I found interesting.
Curious to hear forum members opinions about it.

   http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/New s.aspx/139419
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Arekkusu
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 Message 2 of 11
31 August 2010 at 8:30pm | IP Logged 
It's not what I'd consider breakthrough information. It only states that the Arabic alphabet is harder to learn than the Hebrew alphabet (for children). It's a good thing they didn't look at Chinese and Japanese...

Of course, learning the alphabet is only a very, very minor part of learning a language, so it doesn't necessarily make Arabic harder to learn than Hebrew.
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Doitsujin
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 Message 3 of 11
31 August 2010 at 8:51pm | IP Logged 
ozeri wrote:

Here is an article I just read,that I found interesting.
Curious to hear forum members opinions about it.
Researchers Discover Why Arabic is Hard to Learn

IMHO, learning to read Arabic is no more complicated than learning a non-Latin alphabet, for example Cyrillic. (After all Arabic has only 28 letters.) Learning to read Arabic is the least of the problems that most Arabic learners face.

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liddytime
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 Message 4 of 11
31 August 2010 at 9:22pm | IP Logged 
In college we learned the entire Arabic alphabet in about 2 hours! It really wasn't difficult at all!

The real reasons Arabic is difficult can be found here:

Why Arabic Is Difficult.

It is an article by Karin C. Ryding, Sultan Qaboos bin Said Professor of Arabic at the Department of Arabic & Islamic
Studies in Georgetown!

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apparition
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 Message 5 of 11
31 August 2010 at 11:58pm | IP Logged 
Doitsujin wrote:
Learning to read Arabic is the least of the problems that most Arabic
learners face.


I was going to say this exact same thing.
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Bao
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 Message 6 of 11
01 September 2010 at 3:58am | IP Logged 
And here I thought it was the diglossia situation.
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ANK47
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 Message 7 of 11
01 September 2010 at 5:44am | IP Logged 
I agree that the alphabet is not very hard. Arabic is difficult because it has no relation to English and thus the words are hard to remember. Another major difficulty in learning Arabic is the pronunciation. There are so many sounds that are not found in English and that are almost impossible to reproduce like a native. And let's not forget that if you really want to know Arabic and understand what people are saying in real life you have to delve into the dialects. I'd say learning MSA and a few closely related dialects (say Lebanese, Syrian, Palestinian, and Egyptian) is really like learning 2 languages.
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Grammatiker
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Studies: Armenian, French, Arabic (classical), Esperanto

 
 Message 8 of 11
01 September 2010 at 8:20pm | IP Logged 
The thing I find very helpful and fascinating about the Perso-Arabic writing system is
that words have a "shape" that characterizes them more than they do in an isolated-
character script like the Roman alphabet we use.

Edited by Grammatiker on 01 September 2010 at 8:24pm



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