What is the fastest way to learn conversational Arabic?
Arabic is usually ranked among the top six of the world’s major languages. As the language of the Qurʾān and Hadith, it is also widely used throughout the Muslim world. Arabic, in its standard form, is the official language of 26 states. The liturgical language of 1.8 billion Muslims, and Arabic is one of six official languages of the United Nations. All varieties of Arabic combined are spoken by perhaps as many as 422 million speakers (native and non-native) in the Arab world, making it the fifth most spoken language in the world. A Semitic language(includes Hebrew and Amharic, the main language of Ethiopia), Arabic first emerged in the 1st to 4th centuries CE. It rose to become the lingua franca of the Arab world. Named after the Arabs, a term initially used to describe peoples living in the Arabian Peninsula bounded by eastern Egypt in the west, Mesopotamia in the east, and the Anti-Lebanon mountains and Northern Syria in the north, as perceived by ancient Greek geographers, Arabic is widely taught in schools and universities and is used to varying degrees in workplaces, government and the media.
There are several Arabic dialects some of which are mutually unintelligible – Classical Arabic or the language of the Qur’an, the Modern Standard Arabic (used in books, newspapers, on television and radio, in the mosques, and in a conversation between educated Arabs from different countries for example at international conferences), and local dialects that vary considerably! And the ISO has assigned language codes to thirty varieties of Arabic!
Arabic is a highly inflectional tongue. Subject, tense, and mood are communicated by how you inflect your tone. There are ten usual verb patterns, and students must memorize the conjugation and vocalization for the active and passive voices. Plurals and their agreements with numbers are more difficult and complex than what we are used to in English.
