About Learning Arabic

So I want to talk a little about what it is actually like, day-to-day trying to learn and use Arabic here. Yesterday, I felt like I knew absolutely nothing. Honestly, I felt like a real dummy! We watched a short video in class, and I understood very little of it. Then I went to a store, and despite what I have learned, I couldn't communicate. Being in a place where you can't speak the language is really difficult, so the next time you see an immigrant struggling to communicate in English, keep this in mind! I have learned some of a handful of languages now, and without a doubt, Arabic is the hardest. So I'll talk about some reasons why this is. The US State Dept. categorizes languages by their difficulty for English speakers to learn and the number of hours to learn them. There are four levels - Spanish, French, and Italian are Level I, German is a level 2, Hindi is a level 3, and Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean are the level four languages. You probably already know that Arabic is written from right to left, which means that books in Arabic start from the "end" - back of the book per English and finish at the "beginning" - or the cover of English books, but that's not really a difficulty, just a difference. One thing that makes it difficult is the sounds. There are several sounds that exist in Arabic that don't exist in English. Additionally, there are sounds that in English that are different but are represented by the same letter/s. For example, the "th" in theater is a different sound than the "th" in that. Arabic has these sounds, but the are represented by different letters which could actually be considered something that makes Arabic easier. There are many times this happens in English, but native speakers never think about it, but this can be difficult for English learners. How do you know which "th" sound to use? For each Arabic letter, there are four forms, depending on where in a word the letter is. A stand-alone letter can look different when it is at the beginning, middle, or end of a word, and there are no capital letters.

Arabic doesn't typiclly write out short vowel sounds, unless it's the Quran or something like that. If you ever see fancy Arabic calligraphy with lots of little lines over the top, these usually represent short vowel sounds, or the lack of a short vowel after a consonant, or the doubling of a consonant sound. In most written Arabic - news articles, street signs, books, these aren't written. For native speakers, this isn't a problem, much like if you tk ot vwls n nglsh, u cld stl ndrstnd. However, if you are learning, that makes it more difficult to sound out and recognize words.

Here's a fun thing about Arabic - each noun has a singular and plural form like English, but it also has a dual to represent 2 things. So for 1 thing, you use the singular. For two, you use the dual, and then here's the fun part. From 3-10 things, you use the plural form, BUT for 11 to infinity things, you go back to using the singular form of a noun. So you probably know that Arabic is spoken across the Middle East. It is the official or co-official language in Saudi Arabia, Chad, Algeria, Comoros, Eritrea, Djibouti, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, Bahrain, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. It is also spoken in parts of Turkey, Niger, Iran, Senegal, and Mali. HOWEVER, the Arabic spoken in Morocco, for example, is very different than the Arabic spoken in Iraq. Even native speakers might have some difficultly understanding if they aren't from the area. Most Arabic schools teach Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), also called foos-ha. Then you can also study classical Arabic like the Quran is written in, and then all the dialects spoken are called "ammiya." MSA is really not a spoken language, but it is often used in written things and the news and radio. This means that if you learn MSA, because it is taught in schools like our English classes, almost anyone in an Arabic speaking country will be able to understand you, BUT you may not be able to understand them because some words are completely different. Sometimes the grammar is different. There will probably be more differences as I continue learning. Some other interesting things: The Arabic language doesn't have the sound for the letter "P" so they usually substitue "B". There is also no letter "V", so they usually use "F". There is no present tense linking verb "to be" in Arabic. So if you want to say "My house is big" you say "My house big". Below is some of my writing for my homework.