What are the biggest challenges in learning Arabic?

Arabic is a Semitic Language, like Hebrew and Aramaic. Around 292 million people speak it as their first language. Many more people can also understand it as a second language. The Arabic language has its own alphabets written from right to left, like Hebrew. Since it is so widely spoken throughout the world, the language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, the others being English, French, Spanish, Russian and Chinese. The Arabic language is assuming a central position in international business. One cannot underestimate the significance and importance of Arabic in the modern world, and the scope of the Arabic language in India is growing and vast. Arabic is becoming a critical language in India and outside it when it comes to operating an international business trying to break into foreign markets. Learning the Arabic language opens up many employment avenues and possibilities in several different industries such as oil, travel, finance, industrial collaborations, and translation, to name a few.

In this blog, we’ll discuss what are the biggest challenges in learning Arabic? First of all Arabic is often considered a “hard” language for English speakers to learn. But we’ll also discuss why hard is definitely not the same thing as impossible, and why it’s a challenge that everyone can take on.

Biggest Challenges in learning Arabic

Grammatical complexity

The most important challenge faced by learning Arabic is to learn Grammar. 

One of the things that makes a language hard to learn is how complex its grammar is. Now, every language’s grammar is complex in its own way.

 For example, try to explain the rules in English of why we say “a girl” but also sometimes we can say “the girl” and also we can say “girls” but also “the girls” but not “a girls” — and if it’s tough to explain, imagine how tough it is to learn.

Arabic has a lot of grammatical features that are very different from what we have in English. Let’s take the following as an example of this:

• In English, we say things like “I write,” but “she writes.”
• Arabic has the following forms (for starters, just in the singular):
• I write: 2aktub / أَكْتُب
• You (masculine) write: taktub / تَكْتُب
• You (feminine) write: taktubiin / تَكْتُبين
• He writes: yaktub / يَكْتُب
• She writes: taktub / تَكْتُب

As you can see, there’s an interesting difference between English and Arabic. English only really has different verb forms based on whether I’m doing the writing or she’s doing the writing, etc. Arabic has different verb forms depending on whether it’s a man doing the action, or whether it’s a woman. An English speaker learning Arabic needs to carve out a new space in their brain where they remember, “Okay, when I’m forming verbs, I need to think about gender, too.”

Writing and Pronunciation

Arabic has an alphabet that’s different from what’s used to write English. This is what written Arabic looks like:

لِنَذْهَبْ إِلَى السِّيْنَمَا

The Arabic alphabet is both beautiful and challenging to master. 

Here are some of the challenges that are faced during reading and writing Arabic. :

-The language is written from right to left. This is difficult both conceptually and technologically; most computer systems were developed for left-to-right languages like English.

-Letters change shape based on whether they’re in the beginning, the middle, or the end of a word.

 See, for example, how the letter ب changes shape depending on its position in the word.

باب.                                هو كتب.       

                          He wrote                            Door

-Short vowels don’t get written out as full letters. Instead, the expectation is that people reading Arabic will know how to pronounce the words they read. It’s like how English readers know how to pronounce words like “bought” and “tough” even though it’s not obvious from the spelling — but on an even bigger scale. Those skills don’t come quickly!

Above in the blog, some challenges are mentioned that are faced by Arabic learners during learning. 

If you want to overcome the challenges then you have to take classes from any recognised institute or any best language learning app.

I wish to recommend that you join Multibhashi for language learning. We have online classes to learn Arabic. Multibhashi have highly professional teachers that will help you to overcome the challenges coming during learning Arabic.

You can join us by clicking here.

All the best!!

Keep learning!!