Arabic: Why is it so popular or IS it?

Languages are a passion and a sort of hobby for me. I'm particularly interested in their grammar, syntax and phonetics. I like making a comparison amongs the languages I know. After that I adore reading papers, magazines, books, short essays in various languages. I have to admit that if you learn a language and you don't have the opportunity to practise it you'll probably forget it. This could be considered a waste of time. After all I'd say that my interest in languages is merely linguistic and cultural more than practical.-olaszinho

Thanks for sharing. It's interesting for me to learn why people choose certain languages. I like languages a lot, but they are mostly tools for me.

In the bookstore I saw "Gulf Arabic" and "Standard, I think)Arabic" offered by the same company. This is the first time I've noticed this-two choices.

Are there people who say that they speak two kinds of Arabic?

That's a good answer, thanks.

Another factor is the caligraphy which is medium-difficulty if you study it ad nauseam; it's sort of a cursive language but with 2 more ways of writing it-Guest


Thanks for your link. This may sound funny, but after looking at that chart, Arabic doesn't seem nearly as intimidating. I could see similarities with Hebrew on a couple of levels.-K. T.

"and makes you nutty at times"-Guest

Well, pronunciation may be another matter entirely. I've noticed that Koreans and at least some speakers of Arabic don't distinguish between "p" and "b" when they speak. I remember a Palestinian guy who spoke English very well, but he didn't bother to work on this aspect of pronunciation.

"Pat, bat" he'd say, "who cares?" I couldn't convince him that it was important.

I imagine that there are some sounds that are equally difficult to make or distinguish for English or other speakers of Arabic.

>>After all I'd say that my interest in languages is merely linguistic and cultural more than practical.

That's exactly my approach to most part of the languages. I learn Arabic just because I'm generally intrested in different grammars and writing systems. I'm pretty sure that I won't practice the laguage anywhere, and I won't be fluent, and it's not my goal, I learn it just because I like learning something complicated, it's difficult to explain. European languages (Roman/Germanic/Slavic) aren't intresting for me anymore, they look boring, so I try to find something exotic and totally different from what I already know.

Well, this thread is demystifying Arabic for me very quickly and I thank Josh and the other guests for their comments.

Much more so than Hebrew: all those squares and tiny dots look the same to me.-Josh

Well, I understand that those dots are just for the learners (vowel pointing, I think they call it.) Once kids learn to read, they don't need those hints anymore. Japanese has "hints" for people as well, although not vowel pointing. There is a smaller size font that shows how to pronounce the Chinese characters (furigana), but I imagine that you probably already know that.

Probably all languages look a little mysterious at first, then we start decoding them.

Is there a system of vowel pointing for kids learning Arabic?

Thanks, that makes sense.