Is Arabic Hard to Learn

there are many reasons you might want to learn Arabic you might have family or religious connection you might love traveling in the area or you might want to make boatload of money because get this Arabic is considered critical Language by the US government and learning the language could earn you some very big bucks indeed whatever your reason for learning Arabic you're probably wondering how hard is it actually Arabic is very exciting language to learn but let's be real it can feel bit intimidating at first so is it too tough to tackle well in this video will tell you exactly what is easy what is challenging and why learning Arabic might be easier than you think so you can stop worrying and jump right in Arabic writing is one thing that can keep people away from even getting started with the language which is real tragedy but is it really so mysterious and difficult I've learned Arabic myself lived in the Middle East for number of years so I'm going to tell you it is not at all difficult these weirdly beautiful shapes they're not hieroglyphics they're not anything to do with rocket science there's just 28 letters that's two more than English and they're all made with five basic shapes now like many things in languages and life it can be bit tricky at first to wrap your head around because it's just unfamiliar but you very quickly figure out that what seems difficult in this adapting writing is simply because letters have different forms depending on where they go in the word beginning middle or end long and down the beginning of the word is like this and there in the middle at the end so here's the thing Arabic writing style is always connected but if you write cursive with English it's exactly the same concept the biggest difference is that you write from right to left so mastering it is going to be little bit challenging but also very beautiful and very rewarding experience if you're curious here's an excellent guide you can check out later my name is olle Richards by the way I'm linguist and an author I've even written books to help you learn Arabic 20 languages in this series and just love helping people let you figure out which language you want to learn and helping you actually do it so let's keep going with the good stuff whether you communicate an idea in Arabic is bit different from how you communicate that idea in English because the structure of the language is different for example Kiki went to the river that sentence that I'm sure you say every day in Arabic you have to switch the words around something like she went Kiki to the river but here's the thing although Modern Standard Arabic is verb subject object language it's not rule and sometimes word order can be quite different this is because Arabic has flexible word order so you can even rearrange words to English style subject verb object and still make perfect sense you he she this that pronouns they can be interesting in Arabic they're easy enough to learn but then they quickly get quite confusing because you see Arabic pronouns let you get very very specific you start off just like any other language that has gender so there are different words for masculine and feminine things and there's plural version too but then it gets interesting because Arabic has special pronoun for when you're speaking to only two people it's called the Dual pronoun and it's like saying the two of you or the two of them or both of you in other words Jewels refers to exactly two while plurals refer to three or more what do you think happens with possessive pronouns you know mine his hers and so on had this is house let's add the suffix this is my house yep that red word glued to the noun is the pronoun and the same thing happens with verbs and prepositions I'm so glad that English keeps all of their words separate like two of my favorite words like And subscribe mean they're easy to understand right and you know exactly what to do right time to crank things up or Notch Arabic pronunciation is notoriously difficult and when you listen to these strange and unusual sounds the language can seem quite bewildering if you're coming from native English background it's not vowel yeah let's start off by saying it's not vowel it's not it's not like the German know it's not Iraq not Iraq no it's it is no European language that's for sure your mouth needs to get used to some strange new things or maybe it's your throat and it's important to get it right because tiny pronunciation changes can alter the meaning of your entire sentence but honestly most Arabic sounds won't be new to you and only few will take lot of practice and here's something nice to make you smile every word in Arabic is spelled exactly as it sounds and the spelling will give you the pronunciation so there is no scary guessing game like English or French and great place to learn Arabic pronunciation or Arabic script or the entire Arabic language is right here at story learning because we teach languages in an easy and fun way that is designed especially for adventurous people like you and it works because you already learned your home language with stories right well story learning just is an extension of that it takes this concept of learning through stories and it teaches you new languages again through sto stories but adapted for more adult audience that you can engage with and is more fun it is the most natural way to learn language and if you're curious about this and would like to learn any more there's QR code up here on the screen that you can scan and that will take you to my free story learning kit which is full of worksheets master classes explanations of how the method works you can also click the link down below it will take you to the exact same place so click that out check it out and now back to the video El I'm doing it too harsh El here come the verbs my friend now love this part because Arabic has unique and amazing way of building words where you get dozens of words after learning just one you can even say the language is centered around verbs and the Magical secret to word's meaning is all in the root you see nearly every word in Arabic is based on combination of three letters that together form root and each three-letter cluster has certain type of meaning take root like for example these three letters put together carry the idea of learning now if you add different consonants and vows to this route you get different words but they're all to do with the idea the concept of learning here's another one the hbb hbb letter combination now this one carries the meaning of Love yeah you know this word Habibi don't you well hbb it makes it's the the root sounds that make the word and other words relating to love and affection and you can even find nouns and adjectives with the Roots it all depends on the arrangement cool thing is once you know the root word you will start seeing patterns and recognizing so many other words it really is quite ingenious also the verb conjugation system is quite easy there are just two main tenses the past and the simple present verbs have regular conjugation and they are changed little bit for three persons and three numbers remember Modern Standard Arabic which is the one that's taught in most places is going to be harder than the dialects of individual countries when it comes to verbs bear that in mind that it will be little bit less stressful but some things are about to get broken there's certain phenomenon in Arabic that makes it unusual ready for this plurals don't just come in two or many masculine or feminine they also come in two Fantastical flavors sound and broken now sound plurals are easy they're the regular type and you just add suffix to the singular form but to make broken plural you got to change the pattern of vowels inside the words literally by breaking the word up you might even add or erase letters in the word quite interesting now there are many patterns of broken plurals in Arabic and to really get to grips with this feature in deeper way you need tons and tons of exposure to the language so get mingling go to the country meet the people listen to The Sounds watch TV whatever you got to do Arabic words have special characters called cases and the system of case endings is where things really start to give you bit of headache at least they do for me unless you already speak language with cases like German of course in which case you'll get it in no time an Arabic word can have one of three different endings depending on its function in the sentence in English we use word order to show who does what but Arabic has kind of free word order so we have to attach function Clues to the actual words the only English words with case are pronouns see what mean but Arabic nouns adjectives names and numerals all have case usually it would be specific vowel attached to the end of the word either or the good news is you don't have to even really think about case endings in spoken Arabic because they pretty much disappeared from the dialects you only need to learn them so that you can write Arabic uses type of alphabet called which is totally different concept to our own alphabet an abjad doesn't have vowels which means when you write Arabic the natural way you don't write any of the vowels of course this makes reading the language pretty hard at first because you need to kind of know the word in order to be able to guess how it sounds kind of backward right it's only short vowels that are problem for longer vowels like the and the and so on Arabic uses these three consonants to indicate that sound short vowels do exist in speech of course you just can't write them so it sounds pretty outrageous but Don't Panic luckily beginners have the options of using what are called diacritics which are three little marks that go above or below word to show you where the short vowel should be take this letter here which sounds like depending on which diacritic we add it will be bu So reading Arabic texts that have these markers for vows is actually quite easy and even fun problem is that most Arabic writing simply doesn't have them you're mostly only going to find them in books for Learners mean my my book of AR short stories we use di critics throughout probably can't see this but the die crit on everything the reason for that is because it shows you how to pronounce the words that you're actually reading it's not about guessing though fundamentally once you start recognizing words you've learned you'll just know what the vow is because you know the actual word it's strange that way but you get used to it especially if you keep seeing words in context and that's the point of reading many of you don't know Arabic that's okay my job is to make you feel bad about that but also to tell you it's easy to learn luckily Arabic also has some very helpful things for the learner and for native speakers as well have you ever heard of the Franco alphabet or the chat alphabet it's way of writing Arabic using Latin letters here but only want you to use this in the very beginning when lived in Egypt was actually texting my friends quite bit using that because it's so much easier and they actually use it themselves you you just want to use it at the beginning and certainly not as substitute for learning the language if you're Keen to see more about how it works no worries got you there are some great tips on my blog I'll put link in the descript description so in the end what do we think about Arabic hard or easy well the Foreign Service Institute says it will take you 88 weeks think that's bullish it's going to take lot longer than Spanish for example that's for sure but if you learn dialect like Egyptian which was mine it's going to be lot easier than Modern Standard Arabic in my opinion Arabic is both easy and hard it really depends what you're looking at what you pay attention to but promise you one thing if you are dedicated and you put in the work and you practice just like anything it should take you under certainly under two years to become conversational found in my case by practicing lot speaking the language when was in Egypt within 6 to 12 months was quite confident and if you go and live in an Arabic country like did you'll be speaking way sooner you're all fired up and ready to start sounding like that well you should definitely head over to my next video It's All About TV shows you can watch to help you learn the language think you'll be very surprised to see which four shows there are cuz there are only four that work