What makes arabic difficult

Arabic is a frequent visitor on lists about the hardest languages for English speakers to learn. The language learning communities are filled with anxious Arabic learners venting about the tough task of becoming fluent in Arabic. The Foreign Service Institute estimates about 2, hours or 88 weeks or almost 2 years of study time to achieve general proficiency.

The most often-cited reasons for labelling Arabic as difficult is simply because it contains rather little in common with the European language families. Belonging to the Afroasiatic language family , Arabic has had a path of development distinctly different from the big European languages. Although, since Arabic was the language of science during the Middle Ages, there are words that have crossed over to the global speak from that era.

What are you learning Arabic for exactly? Some of the more specific reasons we hear are:. Then there are vague responses like these:. Adding to the previous point, your purpose will determine which Arabic you learn. We also get a lot of questions about dialects here on this site:. Which dialect should I learn?

In the military and being deployed to Iraq? Have Jordanian extended relatives? Learn Jordanian Levantine. Want to be able to read newspapers but have no need to speak with people? Why is it better if you have no interest in Egypt? Other than that, stick with what you care about.

Only learn Modern Standard Arabic if literacy is your primary goal. Squiggles and dots! But what does that even mean? When we say a language is hard, what are we talking about? After all, babies can learn to speak any language on earth — and so can adults, given enough time and effort.

Why is this? The process of learning a new language is like that master guitarist learning a new instrument. If you give the guitarist a mandolin, a lot of the skills they already have will help them: tuning the instrument, strumming, etc.

A flute, though, requires a very new set of skills. And drums? If English is a guitar, then a language like Dutch a very similar language is a mandolin. Something like Japanese, though, is more like the drums: you have to learn all-new ways of playing. One of the things that makes a language hard to learn is how complex its grammar is.

Arabic has a lot of grammatical features that are very different from what we have in English. Mandarin Chinese the most common dialect has four tones , so one word can be pronounced four different ways, and each pronunciation has a different meaning. Next on the list of the hardest languages to learn for English speakers is Arabic, which is also in the top five most spoken world languages. Arabic is another language with a non-Latin alphabet.

The thing that makes reading and writing in Arabic particularly challenging for beginners is the exclusion of most vowels in words. Ths mks rdng th lngg vry dffclt. Arabic is also written from right to left instead of left to right, which takes some getting used to. There are also characteristics of spoken Arabic that make it hard to learn.

The grammar is challenging too; verbs tend to come before the subject, and you have to learn a dual form of words in addition to the singular and plural forms. From this point forward, the hardest languages to learn get less difficult but are still quite challenging.

Polish got the number three spot on our list.