Question to Americans!

[ministerC4]

Regardless of whether you wanted to or not you did use it. I will give you benefit of the doubt but next time i wont be so lenient and might be forced to report you to the authorities.

Omfg XD This guy has to be trolling now.

 

[Funky Tiger]

Regardless of whether you wanted to or not you did use it. I will give you benefit of the doubt but next time i wont be so lenient and might be forced to report you to the authorities.

yea, breaking the goddamn rules is highly ****ed up.

 

[Jɑégar]

فدبت اللبناني أنا
Mah lang <3

 

[Prometheus Beta]

Not personally fond of Semitic languages, too guttural. And yes, for native English speakers, Arabic would be in the category of most difficult languages to learn.

You must be registered for see links

 

[NineSNS]

Any language you're not familiar with sounds strange.

Japanese should be just as strange to you as Arabic, but maybe you've grown accustomed to its sounds and pacing from watching subbed anime?

 

[abhiken]

i am not sure about Arabic but i read somewhere that Chinese language is probably the language with most number of alphabets.
thus, makeing it harder to learn

 

[elitenoob94]

Any language you don't understand sounds like gibberish.

This^

OT: Arabic is defiantly hard to learn because of it's exotic writing system much like Japanese and Mandarin. I use to speak cambodian when I was very young but now forgotten. I wish to re learn it because my other family speaks it.

 

[Aim64C]

Do you feel like the language arabic is Like talking jeberish like u don't understand any word and that its very very very hard to learn? And is it harder than chinese in your opinion? Just curious

أوبيتو>>>>>>>>>ألإفضل لك

The roots of Arabic draw from a somewhat different verbal pattern that causes several problems for those familiar with western and eastern languages.

Western languages tend to have heavy Latin and Germanic influences that revolve around root word and pre and post modifiers to that word. Words are 'assembled' from roots and prefixes. Many eastern languages are very similar in the way words are formed, structurally.

East - direction
ern - denotes relationship
east-ern - of relation to the east.

modi - alter
fy - to do [root]/the concept thereof
er - object/actor thereof

modifier - object/concept/thing that causes alteration.

Basically, the verbal components of a word are assembled from various verbal primitives that are individual noises.

By comparison, Arabic draws its roots from consonants, with the vowels spanning those consonants modifying/further defining the root.

A very popular example of this is the Arab root SLM.

The root SLM can mean 'well being' or 'one-ness.' For political reasons, the common translation into English is "Peace."

Salam al akum is "may peace be upon you." A more accurate translation is: "May you be well."

Islam stems from the same root - meaning "Wholeness" or "Unity."

It is this heavy emphasis on vowel inflection to derive proper meaning that causes many problems with Arabic as a written language. Early forms of Arabic script simply had no indicators as to precisely how the script should be read/interpreted. While context clues could go a long way to giving insight, some things can have radically different meanings/contexts when a different inflection is applied.

Compared to the modular nature of Latin based languages, Arabic is considerably more challenging to learn both in its verbal components and its written expression.

English can be challenging with its numerous exceptions to the conventional rules - it is still a language that is very robust and serviceable. Even if you are speaking in a very unusual way, if you understand what verbal components you need, you can 'wing it' and people will get what you are trying to say. You can also draw inference very quickly from words and statements you've never heard before simply by breaking words down to familiar roots.

By comparison, while this can be done at a sentence level with Arabic, it is much more difficult for someone (particularly those of us from Latin languages) to do the same for individual words within Arabic.

As for how the language sounds - it reminds me a lot of Hebrew (in fact, the greeting "Salom" would indicate that the two languages derive from a common influence).