<p>French sounds sexier than Arabic; something to think about.</p>
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French sounds sexier than Arabic; something to think about
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<p>thats personal taste......</p>
<p>Indeed. :)</p>
<p>take arabic since most peole say it's the most useful. justin case you get hired as/in CIA.</p>
<p>If you're interested in Arabic and Hindi, maybe you could learn Urdu--which I believe uses the same script as Arabic, yet is basically the same spoken language as Hindi. Hindi is really not very difficult, though, and there's a huge film industry for you to practice your listening skills with.</p>
<p>I study both French and Arabic right now. </p>
<p>As a first warning, if you are not committed to Arabic, don't study it. It is one of the hardest languages in the world to learn, and it is completely different from western/romance/germanic languages. It will take years to gain proficiency good enough for being conversational or fluent if you only take courses at an american school. </p>
<p>That said, it is also one of the most needed and fascinating languages. The history of Islam and of the Middle East is very much steeped in the Arabic language, and it is fascinating to see how they have developed together. If you are willing to make the effort to really try and learn it, it is very rewarding. Not to mention awesome because not many other Americans speak it, and people are always surprised if you do.</p>
<p>French was the first language I started studying and I still love it now. The way its sounds it beautiful, and there are so many different cultures and peoples that speak it that it is relevant even for those with no interest in France. It is a romance language and if you have studied another romance language it will be pretty easy. The hardest part to me is that it does not look like it sounds. The grammar is not too difficult; you will be able to compare many things with English.</p>
<p>It really is your personal choice based on what kind of language learning experience you want. Both will be able to benefit you, but possibly in different ways. Good luck choosing!</p>
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As a first warning, if you are not committed to Arabic, don't study it. It is one of the hardest languages in the world to learn, and it is completely different from western/romance/germanic languages. It will take years to gain proficiency good enough for being conversational or fluent if you only take courses at an american school. </p>
<p>It is a romance language and if you have studied another romance language it will be pretty easy. The hardest part to me is that it does not look like it sounds. The grammar is not too difficult; you will be able to compare many things with English.
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<p>I've never studied arabic and am currently on french. To be conversational or fluent in any language really requires at least a year mimimum. Even if does some sort of immersion, moving to a place where the language being studied is the only spoken language, it takes time. Perhaps it is harder to learn arabic than a romantic language or germanic language after being familiar with English, but, seeing that Arabic was influence by Indo-European, it cannot be impossibly distant from other existing languages. True fluency is difficult with either language, but i would agree with the previous poster is saying that Arabic is harder.</p>
<p>"Pretty easy" doesn't mean much, because thorougly learning any language is hard. I do agree with the previous poster in that familiarity with one language related to the new language being studied can help a lot.</p>
<p>I'm not saying french will take only a year or less; it won't. But the obstacles to learning it, are, IMHO, smaller than those to learning arabic. Arabic grammar is simply not similar to our grammar. The alphabet is entirely different, it is written right to left, and you can have reasonably long sentences without actually having a verb. The sentence structure is often the opposite of English, and the nouns change depending on where they are in a sentence. </p>
<p>Maybe you don't consider this "distant," but that sure as hell fits my description. I had already studied French, Spanish, and some Russian when I started learning Arabic, and I still find it extremely difficult. True, learning any language is hard, but it is common knowledge that some are harder than others. Arabic happens to be one of those.</p>
<p>See below quote from the center for applied linguistics
<a href="http://www.cal.org/resources/langlink/june03feature.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.cal.org/resources/langlink/june03feature.html</a></p>
<p>Another difficulty that teachers and learners of Arabic face is the dissimilarity between Arabic and most Western European languages, such as English, French, German, and Spanish. Arabic is a Semitic language and very different in structure from the Indo-European languages that English speakers commonly study. Arabic has some phonemes that European languages do not along with a very complex morphological system. Sentence structure is often Verb-Subject-Object instead of Subject-Verb-Object as in English. Also, there are few cognates between Arabic and English or other Western European languages (Ryding & Johnson, 2003).</p>
<p>Alita, i agree with you. I just didn't want it to seem like really learning another language was easy. :)</p>
<p>Then I definitely agree :-)....this is my sixth year learning french, I have studied in France, my job is part french-speaking and my best friend is french. But I still don't consider myself totally fluent. I'm not sure if I ever will.</p>
<p>Damn bilinguals from birth ;-)</p>
<p>I know! I'm so jealous . . . and of trilinguals. and quatralinguals. I just took my final for French I today, and i did well! Sadly, i doubt if i will ever be even somewhat fluent in another language, because i will likely never have a part french speaking job and will probalby only study in another country for half a year at most. <em>tear</em></p>
<p>hey...half a years can add up ;-)</p>