Introduction:
Learning Arabic might not affect your English skills; it actually depends on you. A person who is a fast learner and stays focused might not get confused between Arabic & English. However, a person who is not focused and gets distracted easily might face issues while reading or writing stages only. There are dozens of varieties of the Arabic language — generally classified by the region or country in which they’re spoken — that can be radically different from one another. So the first step is to choose which dialect you want to pursue, but that’s the easy part. Arabic is another language with a non-Latin alphabet. Its 28 script letters are easier for English speakers to comprehend than the thousands of Chinese characters, but it’s still an adjustment to become familiar with a new writing system. The thing that makes reading and writing in Arabic particularly challenging for beginners is the exclusion of most vowels in words. This makes reading the language very difficult. Arabic is also written from right to left instead of left to right, which takes some getting used to.
So instead of looking at this topic in a pessimistic manner, we’ll understand this by discussing the benefits an English speaker can get while learning Arabic:
Important things to keep in mind
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Arabic Grammar
Arabic grammar is an involved process. Arabic is a highly inflected language with many rules that may surprise English speakers such as:
- The basic meaning of a word is given by the consonants that form the root of that word, and the precise sense of the word is determined by which vowels are added between the consonants.
- Arabic has a singular, plural, and dual form, so having two of something is different than having three of something as far as the grammar’s concerned. The verb generally comes before the subject in Arabic sentences.
- Easy Pronunciation Although learning Arabic involves learning an entirely new alphabet, once learned, you can benefit from the fact that
- Arabic is written phonetically, so every word is spelled exactly as it sounds.
- There is no correct intonation to learn in Arabic as all syllables are equally stressed.
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Arabic Sounds
The Arabic sound system has a ton of consonant sounds that you already know very well from English. While there’s really no easy Arabic pronunciation, starting here should make this part of Arabic pronunciation in English fairly simple once you get the hang of it.
- Writing & Speaking – The Arabic alphabet is both beautiful and challenging to master. Here are some of the things that make reading and writing Arabic difficult for someone who grew up speaking and reading English:
- 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.
- 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.
These are some of the benefits that an English speaker can get while learning Arabic. Being bilingual doesn’t mean that your first language will be affected. It’s all about how much concentration you have for each language.