In more than twenty countries across the world and by almost 200 million people Arabic is the spoken language. Making Arabic a popular language choice for anyone looking to speak a different language. Arabic is quickly rising up there next to Spanish as a second language one should be learning.
Arabic is closely related to the Hebrew language an the Aramaic language. There are many varieties to the Arabic language. These varieties are seen through out the Arabic speaking culture varying by region. Arabic is widely known throughout the Islamic world. With that in mind I have put together some tips to help make learning Arabic a little easier.
Most of the sounds that you will hear in Arabic are similar to sounds you would find in many European languages. So if you have heard or know another European language like French then that will help with learning to speak Arabic. If you haven’t ever heard a person speak a European language before and you have no prior knowledge of any of these language do not worry. Arabic is really no more difficult to learn to speak than say learning French or Russian. Once you get the hang of the Arabic language you can even see that it is as simple as learning Spanish.
English vowels have no equivalent in the Arabic alphabet, although the Arabic language does have special symbols that serve as vowels. Vowel symbols are placed above or under the word that is being vocalized. This may prove a little tricky for someone who is an English speaker and been trained on the English alphabet.
When learning the Arabic alphabet avoid using transliteration. This means using characters from your native language. This will hinder your progress as most of the characters in the Arabic alphabet have no equivalent to the English alphabet.
In Arabic an adjective must confirm to the noun it describes. Unlike in English the Arabic adjective will follow the noun it describes. An example of this would be “happy dog” in Arabic this would be reversed to “dog happy”.
The Arabic language makes forming short phrases easy. The reason being is there is no equivalent to the verb “to be”. An example of this is ” I am a woman”. When speaking Arabic you would just say ” I woman”. So you can see that in Arabic to say simple things you do not need to be saying long phrases.
Another good thing to remember when learning to speak Arabic is that there are many versions of the language. A good stepping stone to learning Arabic is to learn using the Egyptian Colloguial Arabic. This version of Arabic is the most wide spread version. So no matter what part of the Arabic world you are in people will be able to understand you.
With the Arabic language you are trying to learn you should learn using an audio tool. This way you can hear how each word and phrase are pronounced. This will help you by allowing you to sit and imitate the words that you are hearing. Books can come in later once you have a clear understanding of the Arabic language to help you learn to read and write Arabic.
