<p>i am seriously considering learning arabic cuz it's sucha cool language all written in cursive and it's useful. also their culture is great.</p>
<p>also, i want to rival charizard by showing him that i too am taking a mega-difficult language. </p>
<p>another reason: arabic is a major language in africa and asia, being afro-asiatic. </p>
<p>another reason: i think i'm losing touch with the venerable asian cultures, i must stay close in touch with it.</p>
<p>Most people learn Arabic so that they can read the Quran and Hadith.</p>
<p>there are plenty of reasons for learning arabic besides religion. i'm christian and i actually see islam as an incentive to learn arabic, so i can spread the gospel. that's one of the reasons why i'm learning french, to actually help the poor in africa. yeah...i'm actually planning to do good instead of sitting on my couch eating nachos all day with no meaning in life..</p>
<p>i'm so sick and tired of this anti-middle eastern sentiment..</p>
<p>Sauronvoldemort said:</p>
<p>"i actually see islam as an incentive to learn arabic, so i can spread the gospel"
"i'm actually planning to do good instead of sitting on my couch..."</p>
<p>the "good" in the latter sentence is certainly arguable...</p>
<p>I don't know. The Islamic tribesmen that he plans on converting might get a kick out of stoning him...</p>
<p>sauronvoldemort- are you serious? The "good" you plan to do is forcing christianity on other religions?</p>
<p>I'm Iranian and are script is the same as Arabic, so it's kind of like an American (like myself) reading Spanish.</p>
<p>Anyways, the language is VERY hard. Learning right-to-left can be hard I imagine. The cursive requires great skill. My handwriting is awful.</p>
<p>There are many subtleties to it. The whole language is abed off of roots and stems, so 2 very similarly spelled words can have very different meanings.</p>
<p>Punctuation is very hard, but I'd imagine that a toddler would understand all the punctuation faster than a kid learning all the vowel exceptions in English.</p>
<p>If you can master this language, then that will be a great hook for anywhere (college or job).</p>
<p>The military would apy lots for you.</p>
<p>It would be a waste of your intellectual time to learn it without a purpose. Are the translations so poor that the culture cannot be properly understood? This would be the past reasoning for understanding many languages and why you, voldy, consider it to imply intellect. It would be spend the time and effort to learn the language to spite a forum member unknown to you. Spend more time considering that, just maybe, the modern way is the most intellectual way to do things (universal language, abriged texts), or prove otherwise.</p>
<p>I live in the Middle East and have learnt or attempted to learn Arabic for aroud 7 years.
When reading or speaking , pronounication is difficult. However , as you learn more you can definitely improve that aspect. Its not all that bad.</p>
<p>Writing , since its a completely different alpahabet , you will have quite a number of problems initally.</p>
<p>^ i thought the main problem with arabic was not writing the vowels. is this similar to english where u just have to know how certain words are pronounced? the script looks pretty easy (easier than chinese), but yes the pronunciation looks horribly hard.</p>
<p>blink: don't hope that i get stoned, cuz i'm not dumb to provoke anyone to stone me.</p>
<p>foxdie: i mean reconciliation. i'm not going to force christianity; what period are we living in? age of Charles V and Philip? i'm not going to copy spanish atrocities in europe. we're in modern age where missionaries usually help (doing "good") to sort of instill the benefits of christianity.</p>
<p>afruff: that is not surprising considering the fact that arabic is afro-asiatic while iranian is indo-european (or is it?). </p>
<p>cwatson: arabic allows one to read alot, but that is that the main reason...</p>
<p>so, anyone have any other benefits of knowing arabic? i suppose that learning arabic is useful in europe, right? because of the immigrants from africa and near east..</p>
<p>"i mean reconciliation"</p>
<p>that's pretty foolish of you. </p>
<p>anyway, this is probably the most useful of languages you could learn. Every major field (from military to gov't to business to social work) could use more arabic speakers...go for it!</p>
<p>How does the shape or difficulty arabic script compare to other scripts in Central Asia area? I understand Hindi has a pretty complicated script also.</p>