Most Difficult Language To Learn?
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Hi everyone! 👋
A simple search on Google will spun up couple million results within seconds, detailing different benefits that come from learning a new language. They range from improved cognitive abilities, to being able to communicate with a new group of people, to even communicating with relatives who we don't share the same language.
But despite the myriad of benefits, some languages can be quite intimidating to learn and attain mastery of both the grammar and the pronunciation of the different words in the new language. More so the Non-Latin languages, for anyone who has tried any Non-Latin language they would agree it takes a while for the brain to get used to the newness of it all.
Personally I have only had experience with one Non-Latin language, that is Arabic. I think it rightly fits the title of the most difficult language to learn, well according to my experience, but research shows it is the second most difficult language to learn Mandarin taking rightly the first place. Since I have zero interactions with Mandarin, Arabic takes the hat of the most difficult language to learn.
I realized my interest for Arabic back in High School when a school mate brought to school a copy of The Quran. I was fascinated by the texts in the book which were unlike any other I had came across, and despite the religion being totally different from the religion I was brought up in, I made it a goal to put in the effort to at least know how to read and pronounce in Arabic. On my own I could not make sense of anything, the alphabet is completely different from English with no similarities whatsoever, but with the guidance from the guy who came with the religious text, I was able to at least comprehend a few characters of the alphabet and their pronounciations, but my dreams to be a master of the language were quickly dying out.
Arabic has a non-Latin alphabet with 28 different script letters, which with guidance are actually easy to comprehend and master the pronunciation.
"The thing that makes reading and writing in Arabic particularly challenging for beginners is the exclusion of most vowels in words. Ths mks rdng th lngg vry dffclt. Arabic is also written from right to left instead of left to right, which takes some getting used to.
There are also characteristics of spoken Arabic that make it hard to learn. Some of the sounds used don’t exist in other languages or are simply unfamiliar to English speakers, including sounds made in the back of your throat. The grammar is challenging too; verbs tend to come before the subject, and you have to learn a dual form of words in addition to the singular and plural forms."
― Dylan Lyons
With the lack of a better way to create a base to learn and understand Arabic, I slowly gave up, and I have never really gotten back to it, but now that I am writing this, I feel like maybe I should revisit it and now with the internet and myriad of language learning applications and extensions see what I can make of it.
Anyway that's it for Day 15 of the #BloggingChallenge. I will see you guys in my next update!
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