If you tell someone that you’re studying Japanese, they’ll very likely comment on how hard the language is. This is interesting, because both Arabic and Hebrew are similar in the fact that they are both Semitic languages, and there are some similar words between MSA (Modern Standard Arabic) and Hebrew. Some time ago I was thinking about learning Arabic, since it is an important world language. I am leul a native Amharic speaker, a decent English speaker(B2-C1 level) and a beginner in Spanish and Korean. He doesnt soy that Hebrew and Arabic are not hard.The only thing which he says is that the languages are not so difficult as seem or as many people think.It does not mean that he thinks the languages are easy !! Alphabet. Also, in Hebrew, stress can change the meaning of the word. My mother language is Persian and I have to say we have the hardest language in the world because lots of slangs is invented every day and we even can’t recognize the other cities speakers accent And I think this text has been written from an western man vision Because Turkish and Arabic is so easy for us and my opinion is exactly against the writer from my vision. hey there..i'm ethiopian and a native amharic speaker (oromo, a cushitic language, is my mother-tongue).. I have found that the Lebanese tend to run all of the consonants much more closely together and leave out most of the vowel sounds. I have just started learning Hebrew a week ago. Visit my Essential Language Learning Tools page for resources to help you learn Arabic or Hebrew. One bad news for amharic learners..lack of material! The difference is that in "high" literary languages like Arabic, people actually teach them and expect students to be able to master them. If it's possible to mix MSA and dialect when I'm speaking??? Not as a language associated with English. Have you ever met someone from a right-to-left writing structure with dyslexia learning to read and write well in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu or Hebrew? People say to me, but when they talk back to me I won’t understand them. Okay, so what makes them easier than people make them out to be? Please keep in mind that this ranking only shows the view of the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) and some language students or experts may disagree with the ranking. I am a native speaker of English who also happens to speak Arabic, Mandarin, and Spanish, but my linguistic abilities are less a measure of my intelligence than they are of my level of “interest” in the cultures and the native speakers with whom I communicate. Take classifications by the FSI and others with a grain of salt and don’t be intimidated by Semitic languages. just talk to him he will understand you. Without the mirror, he struggles. shortly one is not responsible to pronounce letters correctly and the way they make sentence is as every one want to make. How long have you been learning Amharic for? Both Arabic and Hebrew pronunciation systems have more flexibility to pronounce several vowels and some of tricky letters which most European speakers cannot easily pronounce, e.g. I speak Hebrew fluently and learned standard Arabic in school. This oversimplification of learning languages brushes off some of the most important aspects of the language. https://discoverdiscomfort.com/arabic-hebrew-similarities-differences Pretty much impossible, if you ask the Vietnamese themselves. The Arabic script, which rests on "implied vowels" simply makes it impossible for me to read in any language that uses it that I don't know. All Arabs default to Classical Arabic in a conversation if their dialects are two far from each other, anybody who has been to school understands it and it is really not like Shakespearean English...It is part of everyday life. Tamil is a Dravidian language, which would be significantly less difficult to learn for speakers of languages from the same family. Those harsh sounds you hear that sound like somebody’s pissed off about something. Learning Amharic from an English speaking perspective is somewhat hard, but in contrast to learning other Semitic langauges like Arabic and Hebrew it is much easier, easier in regards to certain pronunciations (given the certain similarities), not in regards to sentence/word formations. Slang is a non-count noun. Admittedly, I haven't travelled a great deal and am still learning my first language but when I was in Europe we'd playy the game 'do you know where we are from?' All that info just gets so confusing. I had begun to think that I had developed memory problems with Arabic, until I discussed my fear with other Arabic students. I have taken 2 years of Moroccan Darija classes and am in the third year of Standard Arabic. Plus, there are several different fidel for sounds that are exactly the same-- several different h's and s's. The thing I would recommend for new learners is that 'Learn the letters'. But when you’re learning a language as an adult, there are a few languages that take more time and more effort to progress than … I am confident to say I have learned a great deal in this extremely short period of time. I found your article really interesting. But helps me to be familiarized with arabic pronounciation it has many drills in different actual situations.. and everything has audio!. Sure there are common ways the fidel change based on vowels, but there are just some that throw you for a loop. Take time and learn the letters and memorize the sounds for the letters. Even Georgian has some Arabic borrowings. All my friends were English and Chinese speakers, and my Chinese improved while living in Japan! The great thing though is it is not a tonal Language. Overall MSA uses less words than The Classical Arabic. To answer you, both are just as hard, if you ask a Hebrew speaker then they will say Arabic is harder and the Arabic speakers will say Hebrew, and YO! Understanding Moroccan dialect requires a little more effort than others. In conclusion Arabic is far more difficult than Hebrew ,Syriac,Amharic.Dispite its regular grammar and strange phonetics, you have to learn by heart most nouns and verbs.At least two forms,unless you wanna make mistakes.Arabic deserves its place next to Chinese,Japanese,Korean,etc.It is difficult,unique and (for some) sacred.So stop saying bullshit. The romance languages like Italian, French, Spanish are fairly easy to learn for an English speaker because they're fairly similar. Very cool, and thank you, because I've wanted to learn Arabic for a long time and had thought (well, maybe, but I'm going to wait until I've learned a few others because I've heard how hard it is so it'll take forever to learn). Because of this, acquiring and recognizing vocabulary isn’t nearly as difficult as a language like English where the words office, book and writer have no clear connection whatsoever. I love the way Palestinians speak Arabic! Just to clarify, Modern Standard Arabic is the same as Classical Arabic?? Plus- one gets to read the various scriptures in the original. Learn about the best language resources that I've personally test-driven. After all, most educated native Arabic speakers make mistakes with the jussive, and they get along just fine. If you’ve learned, are learning or want to learn a Semitic language (including those I haven’t mentioned here), make sure to share your thoughts below! There are many differences between "modern" and "classical" Arabic, especially in vocabulary (words like 'car', 'airplane' , 'television'), and a multitude of others don't exist in "classical" Arabic, of course, but do in Modern Literary Arabic, as well as in the dialects. I'm a lefty and and a native speaker of Arabic, but writing in Arabic has always put a strain on my hand. ), etc. One of the defining aspects of languages like Arabic (and other Semitic languages) is that most of its vocab can be derived from 3-letter roots/stems. From maghreb. And bah,on the other hand ,many people say and think Spanish is very easy to learn ,and at the same time,their grammar is not correct,and they make a lot of grammatical mistakes. Learning a few suffixes is all that’s really necessary to understand noun possession and direct objects in verbs (e.g. Everything is focused on grammar, grammar, grammar, whereas the teachers of most other world languages have moved on to a communicative approach. As I said above, people ask which dialect is the best to learn a lot and make a big deal about dialect variation as if this affects the difficulty level of the language. If you’re an Amharic speaker/learner I’d like to hear your response to that question in the comments section below. Only a handful are used in Modern Arabic. There just really are not any good resources outside of local tutors/friends-- and even those can often be a struggle because they can't communicate specific grammatical points. That article from the BBC that I cited above makes me wonder if Arabic would be a problem for those people though. Thanks for the article. Peace be upon you! As a Peace Corps Volunteer we were given language training, but even the Amharic teachers struggled to find ways to explain what they were teaching. The Darija classes were great because the teacher was pretty much given free range to do whatever she pleased, so we were forced to talk all the time, get into lifelike situations, learn useful vocabulary. Arabic has so many rules, which in my opinion makes it easier to learn. I'm an Applied Linguistics graduate, teacher and translator with a passion for language learning (especially Arabic). I feel that once I get hang of one of these two languages, learning the other one wouldn't be to difficult. Concerning ressources I think it is getting better now, but the one with the least ressources available for is probably Tigrinya even though some arabic dialects may also have few ressources, depeding which one. They all said the same. I'm jumping back into studying Arabic now and hope to begin Hebrew soon! Arabic and Hebrew speakers with Middle Eastern backgrounds easily notice the strong pronunciation similarities they share. Most Arabic speakers can pronounce all letters, Hassan Nasrallah and Bashar AlAssad are anomalies, most the people i know can pronounce every letter not just in Arabic but even the ones that doesn't exist in Arabic (V,soft G, J,P), well at least i can. After 2 years, we definitely knew far more than in 3 years of MSA. Although there are lots of loan words from English (or other European languages) in the spoken dialects, there just aren't a lot of cognates. He's not a teacher, I will learn Arabic most by myself, but it would be cool to have clues, tips, from him. This way, when I encounter a problem, I get quick feedback from a native speaker and can move on. Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic are almost exactly the same. I read a lot of comments on forums and other blogs, and have received emails from people asking questions about the difficulty of Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew (Arabic mainly). I’d also like to know how the hell Amharic (the Semitic language of Ethiopia with the much more challenging Ge’ez script and more unfamiliar culture to English speakers) is easier than Arabic. After of it, the teacher didn't give more lessons.. iso I stopped my studies. I found a teacher who was giving free online lessons.. so finally I started to learn. First of Amharic has letters, approximately 150, which is a lot compared to Arabic which is basically 28 I guess. I think people need to learn classical Arabic first,all Arabs know it,and on forums we chat with it,we listen to it in news and it's the language you read in it ! — Vocabulary. Ge'ez on the other hand is an Abugida, a much more common type of writing system than the infamous Abjad. (I was using Al-Madinah book in class) so I looked over book 1, then i studied by myself book 2.. Now I'm working on a book called "Al-arabiya baina yadaik" it's a bit classical.. but more modern than Madinah for sure.. anyway, classical arabic is not my goal. Maha, a very popular YouTube polyglot originally from Palestine and now living in Italy (fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, Italian and English) has put together some very good videos aimed at beginners that have attracted a huge following. Turkish for example is full of Arabic words. Oh, and I would also like to put some blame on the way that Arabic is taught. This is true for all languages but for these in particular it depends on whether you want to learn the classical variety of Hebrew or Arabic for academic or religious reasons (e.g. I want to read the newspapers and watch Al Jazeerah news programs and later, much later, books. yichalal! from the root. Thanks for the response! I taught myself how to read both scripts in a day – it just takes a bit of adjustment switching over to a right-to-left language and getting your head around which letters change shape depending on position. Or is standard Arabic much like Shakespearean English compared to modern English? Classical Arabic is more comparable to Shakespearean English. It is much harder to remember the vocabulary in Arabic, for the reasons you state, than in the other (European languages) that I have learned. There is plenty of resources on "Engish for amharic speakers", so I will apply for "Amharic for English speakers". And if you’ve studied Japanese, you probably agree that the language is a tough one. I’ve also shared the best available resources for learning various dialects here and here as well as the awesome audio content in Rocket Arabic (see my review here) for spoken Egyptian. If reading the language is important to you than Amharic is definitely harder than Arabic. In terms of speaking and listening, I can easily engage in them in both languages. morteza :My mother language is Persian and I have to say we have the hardest language in the world because lots of slangs is invented every day and we even can’t recognize the other cities speakers accent And I think this text has been written from an western man vision Because Turkish and Arabic is so easy for us and my opinion is exactly against the writer from my vision. I found it interesting that you said people find your Australian accent difficult to understand. This makes learning Arabic vocabulary a cinch! B… But, there are soft and hard sounds that make a difference in meaning like in spanish 'pero and perro. I don't know why the structure won't stick in my head. Hebrew reading with vowels is much harder for me. Hebrew Reads from Right to Left. I'm an Arabic speaker from Jordan and can easily understand all regional dialects of the language. 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