I have recently decided that I wanted to learn Arabic. I love learning and I speak Francais tres mal already, so I wanted to learn another. When looking at all the languages I could learn, I thought about why I would want to take the time to learn them.
I started with Spanish and that's the most reasonable option according to my life experiences. Many people around me speak Spanish and I have a hard time speaking to those Spanish speakers who do not speak English but I get by... barely. Also Spanish in my field Spanish is a smart choice because there are alot of people I need to either question, help or get a statement from that I need a translator to get the whole story.
Then I looked at Italian. I thought that would just be a fun language to learn. It's very beautiful and there's alot of history in the Italian language. It would also be a great advantage whenever I go to Europe to speak the languages in two of the major places I want to visit.
Chinese was another language that I thought would be fun to know. I picked up a few quick phrases to test the waters and thought that it was a beautiful language. I quickly decided that I would need to take a class rather than try on my own because I could very easily call some one's mother a horse just by the inflection in my voice.
I also looked into Arabic. Arabic has always fascinated me. I loved hearing it in the hookah lounges and at the local Middle Eastern shops I would visit. I know a couple phrases already and thought that it may be fun to learn.
The more I looked into Arabic the more I wanted to learn it. Arabic is the 5th most commonly spoken language and is the official language of over 20 countries and there are well over 300 million native speakers of the language. These speakers are largely concentrated in the Middle East, but there are minority groups of native speakers throughout the world. It is also an official language of the United Nations. I found this great free site, Madinah Arabic, that has lessons set up in both reading and speaking. I am currently still learning the alphabet but I am very encouraged by how easy this site makes it to learn on my own terms.
Better Together: Level8 + F-Stop
6 days ago
3 comments:
That's so cool. I've been wanting to learn another language for a long time. Let us know how it goes, maybe you'll be my inspiration. :)
I was an Arabic tutor throughout undergrad and grad school. I tutored a diversity of students who wanted to learn for different reasons. I had arab americans who wanted to reconnect with their mother language, ROTC kids, people who just liked learning new languages, and the last girl I tutored was a law student from texas who had plans to work in Dubai.
I recommend the Al-Kitaab books and tapes. Although some of the organization doesn't make sense it's really simplified and easy to follow.
Wow that's amazing! My hats off to you!
Thank you, I will definitely check it out.