Learning Arabic

I'd decided before getting to university that one of my extra-curricular activities had to involve learning a language because I've always learnt languages in some way or form throughout my education, so it would be hard for me to not keep on learning languages. I was torn between Russian and Arabic but eventually I chose Arabic because I thought it would be more interesting to learn a language that wasn't a European language and that has a different alphabet and numerical system to the roman alphabet and numerical system. I also thought that it would be a good way to learn about and gain a better understanding of the culture of the Middle East.


I thought Arabic would be hard but I soon learnt that it wasn't as difficult as it is often made to seem. Arabic is actually very easy to learn phonetically because their sentences are often much simpler than our sentences as they often don't use a verb, where we would use a verb. So, for example, when they say our equivalent of, "My name is (insert name)", the contents of their sentence will actually amount to a sentence, whose literal translation means, "My name (insert name)". This can admittedly be explained in part by the fact that they share a similarity with Russian by not having the verb, "to be" for simple sentences. Admittedly Russian has no present tense for the verb "to be" at all and I'm not entirely sure when Arabic sentences do necessitate this verb. The other odd characteristic I've noticed about the language is that it involves a lot of words, which would sound like colloquialisms or child speak to most Europeans, e.g. "omm", meaning "mother", "howa", meaning "he", etc.

Nevertheless, although Arabic is easy to learn phonetically, it takes a while to get used to writing the characters of the Arabic alphabet. I remember the first time, when I was introduced to the characters of the Arabic alphabet and I started trying to write them, it felt like I was back in year 1 or the receptionary year of primary school, when you're given lessons in how to write the letters of the roman alphabet, although it was harder than writing those letters because I'd never seen these characters before. One of the hardest characteristics to get used to when learning to write the Arabic alphabet, is that all of their vowels apart from "a" and "y" are represented by diacritics (a mark or sign added to a character/letter to change its phonetic form). The other characteristic of Arabic that it takes some time to adapt to is the way in which there is no Arabic equivalent for some vowels in our language, even though some words will be given a phonetic spelling that includes the letter. There are no equivalent Arabic characters for the letters "i" and "u, so you often have to substitute the letter "y" in for a word which has an "i" sound in it. Although they have a diacritic for "o", as is the case with all diacritics, it can only be represented in such a way, if it is a short vowel in the word, so you have to substitute in the Arabic character for "w", when you want "o" to be represented as a long vowel, naturally though this "logic" has taken a while to grasp! I can on the other hand say that it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be to get used to writing from the left rather than the right. In my most recent lesson, we were introduced to the Arabic numbers but I have a feeling that it will take a while to grasp those aswell because I can only remember the way in which 1 and 0 are written.

I think learning Arabic has also been good from a social point of view because the good majority of the people, who do it, study International Relations, so it means that I get to know people other than those, who live in my flat or study law. Some people would get around the problem of meeting people outside of their course or their halls of residence by joining societies but I haven't found any French or German societies, so that wasn't an option for me. I admit that I haven't made any close friends by doing Arabic classes but it still exposes me to new ideas, helps me to cultivate new skills and gives my mind a rest from law, so I think it's been a good activity for me to take up.