What is harder Spanish or Arabic?
For the reasons listed above, among others, Arabic is a challenging language to learn. If you're an English speaker, you'll need to spend more hours studying Arabic than you would studying Spanish to get up to a similar level.
As Luis said, it depends. Assuming you're an English speaker (and especially if you live in the USA), Spanish will be easier to learn, as it uses the same alphabet (plus a couple of letters), has more phonetic spelling than English, and is spoken by a large minority of people in the USA.
Arabic is usually considered one of the most difficult languages to learn, topped by only a few languages like Japanese in terms of difficulty. Plus, it's even harder (or so they say) if you are a native speaker of English or a romance language.
Although the script of the two languages is very foreign to western languages, Mandarin Chinese is significantly harder than the Arabic writing system due to the complexity and multitude of its characters.
Arabic. We can't say that Arabic is one of the hardest languages to learn for Spanish speakers, mainly because the two share many words and some grammar rules.
Rank | Language | Total Speakers |
---|---|---|
4 | Spanish | 534 million |
5 | French | 280 million |
6 | Standard Arabic | 274 million |
7 | Bengali | 265 million |
To a great extent, Arabic influences the Spanish we speak today. Approximately 4,000 Spanish words, which amounts to 8% of the language in total, were originally derived from Arabic. Many of these words you already know and use in everyday conversations.
- Mandarin. Mandarin is spoken by 70% of the Chinese population, and is the most spoken language in the world. ...
- Arabic. ...
- Japanese. ...
- Hungarian. ...
- Korean. ...
- Finnish. ...
- Basque. ...
- Navajo.
Arabic is the queen of poetic languages, the 6th official language of the UN and second on our list of toughest languages to learn.
The main reason why Arabic is difficult to learn for English speakers is that the pronunciation is completely different from English. The word order of Arabic sentences is also different from English. Arabic is one of the hardest languages to learn.
What is the world's easiest language?
- Afrikaans. Like English, Afrikaans is in the West Germanic language family, once thought of as a Dutch dialect. ...
- French. ...
- Spanish. ...
- Dutch. ...
- Norwegian. ...
- Portuguese. ...
- Swedish. ...
- Italian.
Levantine Arabic and Gulf Arabic are the easiest because they are a little clearer and closer to the Egyptian dialect. Only a some words are different, but they are easily understood. For example, "ليه" in Egyptian Arabic "ليش" in Levantine Arabic.
The US Foreign Service Institute (FSI) came up with an estimate for how long it takes to learn Arabic for native English speakers. According to them, you need 2200 hours or 88 weeks to reach Arabic fluency.
Category 1 languages are those Western European languages that are most cognate with English and that are most typologically similar to it. For instance, Dutch, Afrikaans, Spanish, and Italian belong to Category 1.
According to philologist Rafael Lapesa, a Spanish historian and former director of the Spanish Royal Academy, about 4,000 words of modern Spanish come from Arabic.
1. English (1,452 million speakers) According to Ethnologue, English is the most-spoken language in the world including native and non-native speakers.
Language | Total Number of Speakers |
---|---|
English | 1,452,000,000 |
Mandarin Chinese | 1,118,000,000 |
Hindi | 602,200,000 |
Spanish | 548,300,000 |
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
Portuguese. In the north-western part of Spain, Galicia is the mother-land of the Portuguese mother tongue. It's widely considered the closest language to Spanish – the lexical similarity is approximated at 89%.
Spanish is the (or an) official language of 18 American countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela) as well as of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, along with Spain in ...
Does Spanish have any Arabic words?
The Arabic influence in Spanish is primarily lexical. Is estimated that around 4,000 Spanish words have some kind of Arabic influence—8% of the Spanish dictionary. Approximately 1,000 of those have Arabic roots, while the other 3,000 are derived words.
- 1 – Chinese (Mandarin)
- 2 – Arabic.
- 3 – Japanese.
- 4 – Korean.
- 5 – Hungarian.
- 6 – Finnish.
- 7 – Xhosa.
- Mandarin Chinese. There are over 900 million speakers of Mandarin, making it one of the most widely spoken native languages around the world. ...
- Arabic. ...
- Korean. ...
- Navajo. ...
- Icelandic. ...
- Turkish. ...
- 7. Japanese. ...
- Persian.
According to a UNESCO survey, Bengali has been classified as the sweetest language in the world. As a language, Bengali is widely spoken all over India, including Assam and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands. The sweetest language in the world is also recognized in the Constitution of India.
...
Korean.
Language | Dictionary | Approximate number of headwords |
---|---|---|
Korean | Woori Mal Saem, 2017 | 1,100,373 |
Portuguese | Aulete Digital | 818,000 |
Finnish | RedFox Pro | 800,000 |
Antidisestablishmentarianism. For most people, it's the longest word they know. For others, it's a bona fide tongue twister at a whopping total 28 letters and 13 syllables.
Spanish (3/30)
Spanish may be the #1 easiest language to learn. Not only does Spanish share the same alphabet – with the sole addition of ñ – but it's also phonetic. That makes figuring out new vocabulary easy, since the spelling tells you how to pronounce it.
A new study suggests some language learning can take place during sleep. Researchers from Switzerland's University of Bern say they discovered people were able to learn new language words during deep levels of sleep. Results of the study recently appeared in the publication Current Biology.
Learning Arabic can help you better communicate with both Arabs and other Americans. In studying Arabic, you'll have a better grasp of the Arab culture, including its religion: Islam. The more you know about these, the better equipped you're apt to educate people about Arabs.
Why Arabic is actually easy?
It has an alphabet of 28 letters. Letters are joined up. There are actually only 5 basic shapes. Writing goes clockwise (except for one letter – Hamza), from right to left, which for many people is easier than writing left to right as it involves pushing the pen, not pulling it.
It's estimated that for an English speaker to learn Arabic properly, at least 2200 hours of Arabic classes are required. This means that, if you want to speak Arabic fluently in a year, you'll need to study it full-time.
The easiest languages for English speakers to learn are: Danish, Dutch, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish, and French. The US State Department lists these languages as Category I languages.
If you start out as a beginner and manage to spend an average of 1 hour per day working on your Spanish, you should be able to reach conversational fluency within 8 – 12 months. That translates to about 250 – 350 hours spent.
- English. It's the most widely spoken language in the world, making practice possible. ...
- French. French has over 100 million native speakers and is – as the official language in 28 countries – spoken on almost every continent. ...
- Spanish. ...
- Italian. ...
- Swahili.
Egyptian Arabic – Perhaps the most widely understood across all Arab speaking countries.
Arabic is categorized as a Semitic language, meaning it is closely related to languages like Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Amharic. The Semitic languages are a branch of the larger Afro-Asiatic language family, meaning that it is more distantly related to Somali, Oromo, Tamazight, and Coptic/Ancient Egyptian.
Egyptian Arabic
Its grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation differ from other dialects, and it uses a g-sound instead of a j. Learners can consider it the most beneficial dialect of Arabic to learn because it is the most commonly spoken in the Arab world.
مرحبا (Marhaba) – “Hello/Hi”
The answer is مرحبا (Marhaba). Marhaba is the simplest type of greeting that is used across the Arabic speaking world. Marhaba is the ideal general greeting: it is soft to say and is considered to be polite and neutral.
It is better if you can start the Arabic learning course for the child before he/she turns eight years of age. They can pick up the language later as well. However, the learning curve may be slow as they grow up. Teaching your child Arabic can be largely beneficial for their future life.
How long does it take the average American to learn Arabic?
It's estimated that in order to learn Arabic fluently, it will take an English speaker at least 2200 hours of Arabic classes over 80 weeks - or rather, one and a half years of consistent language study. Some people would argue that Arabic is just as hard to learn as Chinese or Korean.
- Slang and Regionalisms. ...
- Gendered Words. ...
- False Friends. ...
- Por y Para. ...
- Irregular Verbs. ...
- All The Tenses. ...
- The R and J and G Sounds. ...
- Understanding Natives.
Spanish is the hardest language to learn. Spanish is spoken by over 570 million people across the world. Over 480 million of these are native Spanish speakers and Spanish is the official language or official co-language of over 20 countries, including Argentina, El Salvador, Venezuela and, of course: Spain.
Spanish from Chile is famously different from the standard version. There are a lot of Chilean words that you won't find in RAE canon. For this reason, some people call “Chileno” the hardest version of Spanish to learn. It's also known to have unclear pronunciations.
Autonomous Communities | Muslim population 2019 | Percentage |
---|---|---|
Cantabria | 5,526 | 0.95 |
Asturias | 8,623 | 0.84 |
Galicia | 19,971 | 0.74 |
Spain | 2,091,656 | 4.45 |
Although it is directly translated to “hopefully,” ojalá actually derives from an Arabic expression: “ma sha allah,” which means “should God will it” (ما شاء الله).
The Arabic name Al-Andalus was originally applied by the Muslims (Moors) to the entire Iberian Peninsula; it likely refers to the Vandals who occupied the region in the 5th century.
Spanish has always been a go-to language for English speakers to learn due to its practicality and wide reach. Well, it's also one of the easiest languages to learn for English speakers.
Arabic is in high demand.
U.S. government agencies are seeking proficient Arabic speakers now more than ever. Learning Arabic won't only get you ahead in a government career, but it will also give you a leg up in any industry in business, engineering, medical, nonprofit and international relations.
- It is one of the most largely spoken languages in the world. ...
- Arabic is in high demand in Western countries. ...
- You will learn about the world's second-largest religion. ...
- It opens a whole new world of travel opportunities. ...
- Have the best time by studying Arabic in immersion.
Is Latin easier than Arabic?
The biggest difficulty is Latin grammar because of its complex rules. It can be very difficult for people to get a hang of the rules. When compared with other languages, the Roman language is easier than Arabic, Ancient Greek, and Mandarin Chinese.
- Afrikaans. Like English, Afrikaans is in the West Germanic language family, once thought of as a Dutch dialect. ...
- French. Ah, the language of love. ...
- Spanish. ...
- Dutch. ...
- Norwegian. ...
- Portuguese. ...
- Swedish. ...
- Italian.
- English. It's the most widely spoken language in the world, making practice possible. ...
- Spanish. It's heavily influenced by Latin and Arabic, spoken as it's written and has fewer irregularities than other romance languages. ...
- Italian. ...
- Swahili.
If you start out as a beginner and spend an average of 1 hour per day working on your Spanish, you should able to reach conversational fluency within 8 – 12 months. That translates to roughly 250 – 350 hours of time spent.
If you're an educator, now is the time to push for more young Americans learning Arabic. Given that less than 1 percent of US college students study Arabic just 32,000 out of 21 million total students Arabic language skills will separate you from the crowd, no matter your professional field.
The language is written from right to left. This is difficult both conceptually and technologically — most computer systems were developed for left-to-right languages like English. Letters change shape based on whether they're in the beginning, the middle, or the end of a word.
Modern Standard Arabic is the best form of Arabic for Arabic language learners to start with. It is the most widely spoken form of Arabic and will likely be the form of Arabic that will be heard abroad.
Arabic. Next on the list of the hardest languages to learn for English speakers is Arabic, which is also in the top five most spoken world languages.
Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi and other ancient languages have a common denominator: they are languages written from right to left. It is said that right-to-left scripts can be indicative of how ancient the language is because of the medium of writing that was used to carve these languages in stone.
Pronunciation is one of the most important and difficult parts of learning Arabic. You can learn grammar, vocabulary, and how to read script to your heart's content, but if no one can understand anything you say it really isn't much good, is it? Arabic features a lot of sounds which aren't found in other languages.
Is Arabic or Greek harder?
Greek is a relatively difficult language to master, even more so for English speakers. But it's still easier to learn than Russian or Arabic. The reason many English speakers find Greek to be so difficult is that it's not closely related to the English language.
English
It is used in global business, worldwide travel, diplomatic affairs, and in computer technology. Not only that, but many of the top global economies are English-speaking ones — the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK.