Language Bites, Vol. 2: Modern Standard Arabic

~Note~

السَلام اليكُم!
Assalam aliakum! (Peace be with you.) My name is Joye Everett, and I am a teenager who LOVES languages. You might know me as the person who taught herself Spanish in 5 months thanks to living in Texas and using Duolingo. I am on a mission to learning the top 10 most spoken languages in the world, and after Spanish, I chose something more exotic: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA).

Arabic is a language spoken by over 422 million people in the world. It's a great tool if you want to stretch your brain and get outside your comfort zone with languages. I'm learning MSA because the dialects of Arabic are very different, and it was luckily standardized so Arabic speakers around the world can communicate.

Is Arabic a Hard Language?

For English-speakers, Arabic may prove to be a challenge, but it's not nearly as hard as it may seem. The alphabet and pronunciation system is very uniform in Arabic, and you'll eventually get to where you don't need the diacritics (aka, the vowel markings) to read and write.

Arabic has a lot in common with Spanish, which is why I advise you at least skim my previous book about Spanish grammar. The languages are distantly connected because of the Ottoman Empire's occupation of Spain, so Arabic grammar weaseled its way into Spanish in senses such as gendered/numbered nouns, adjective rules, and what-have-you.

This book also goes very slow, as I myself am a new learner of Arabic. I'm making this book to help one of my friends learn the language, and hopefully it can help you too. Native speakers....if you see a mistake, let me know so I can fix it.

And I think that's all for this chapter. The next one will detail the writing system and alphabet. Till then, وَداعا (wadaa3aa - bye!) and as always....