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Things You Should Know Before Learning Arabic

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Amenta Sademtk
Things You Should Know Before Learning Arabic

Recent world political and economic events have conspired to bring consciousness of the Arabic language to the fore, but they have also opened up a world of opportunity for anyone far sighted enough to consider studying Arabic افلام اجنبي. With diligent study, exciting career opportunities are open to successful students, for example; freelance translating, translating for bodies such as the UN, international banking posts or teaching and research positions.

As an indication of the importance of Arabic, the U.S. and many other governments have stated that they consider Arabic a critical language. As a consequence, there are many scholarships available from Colleges and Universities, U.S. and Europe-wide.

So is Arabic a difficult language to learn? Well, you will certainly need somewhat more commitment and dedication to learn Arabic, than most European languages...the reason is twofold. Firstly, you have to learn to read and write in a unique script which is completely dissimilar to our familiar Latin script. Secondly, Arabic has many different forms and dialects...an occurrence known as multi glossia. To become successful in Arabic, you will need to become familiar with at least two of these dialects; Standard Modern Arabic, the language of formal usage, and one of the colloquial forms used in everyday settings in Arab speaking countries.

Although demanding, mastering Arabic is by no means impossible. As a sign of encouragement, one has only to witness the increase in professional Arabic translation services offered by document translation agencies in London, as being indicative of an increasing number of qualified translators.

Let us now look at some other information about Arabic that a potential student might find it helpful to know about.

Arabic belongs to the Semitic group of languages, the same group containing Amharic, Hebrew and Maltese. Arabic is one of the most widely used languages in the world and although no exact figures are available, some estimates put the number of native Arabic speakers at some 186 million. Because Standard Arabic is the official language of Islam, however, the actual number including second language speakers will be several million higher.

As mentioned previously, the version of Arabic used in formal situations, on television, in newspapers and for official government use is Standard Modern Arabic, it is a form of classical Arabic used in the Qur'an, but very importantly, it acts as a medium of understanding.

There are a great many colloquial forms of Arabic spread over the Arab speaking countries, but most of these are not widely understood from country to country, thus, an Arab speaking Yemeni would probably not understand an Arab speaking Tunisian except through the medium of Standard Arabic learned whilst learning the Qur'an افلام عربي.

Written Arabic, like Hebrew, uses a series of three letter vowels as a root to convey the general idea of a word, and a system of dialectic marks and interspaced consonants to specify the word and to produce variants; thus k t b would convey the idea of writing and dialectic marks would specify the word as kutub (book), but by adding certain letters before and after the root you could convey root variants such as office, library or author.

Forearmed with a little knowledge, the study of Arabic becomes a little less daunting and an academic interest is engendered in the language. Add to this a diligent attitude and a determination to succeed and a rewarding and lucrative career awaits the successful student.

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