Dec 19

A-DOC: Arabic Classes in New York City

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These articles are recurring features written by Friend Of JET, Jon Hills, who maintains the blog for Hills Learning (www.hillslearning.com). Hills Learning is a NY-based language learning center that offers group and private Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Thai, Arabic, Cantonese and Spanish classes.

Arabic Class listing can be found at: Arabic Classes NYC and Arabic Classes Online

So you might be interested in learning Arabic? In New York City, there’s a variety of Arabic classes offered from a variety of institutions. What this article does is discuss learning Arabic from the lense of a Japanese language learner (assuming most readers on JETWIT have either learned or attempted to learn Japanese in the past).

First of all, why learn Arabic? Just turn on the news and you’ll find out that a lot of the political, business and cultural trends these days seem to be coming from the Middle East. And Arabic (now keep in mind, there are multiple dialects), is the predominate language across the region.

Now to approach Arabic from a Japanese perspective. First of all, Japanese has only five vowel sounds (AIUEO), in case you remember that’s pretty small right? Wrong! Imagine a language with only three vowel sounds, that is Arabic. It sounds crazy but true, what you’ll end up finding is that a lot of words don’t have any vowel at all.

So next up is the alphabet, after all most diligent Japanese learners started by writing out their alphabets for Hiragana and Katakana, right? Do you remember how many characters per language that was? 46. So, you had to learn about 92 characters to start out to begin to pronounce and write Japanese. Arabic only has 28, so you can imagine how quickly your learning might go if you dive into this language.

I know the theme of this article is about how easy Arabic is, believe me, it’s a category IV difficult language (according to the DLI rankings) for a reason (Japanese is too, by the way). (FYI Category IV is the most challenging for English speakers) The fine print that I won’t really emphasize is that each letter’s shape changes depending on where it ends up in the word. Also the pronunciation of Arabic, unlike Japanese, has many sounds that are unfamiliar to the typical English speaker.

The most important thing I’ll end with is that surprisingly enough, when you develop your ability to speak one language, it actually enables you to speak another language easier. I think the confidence that you develop when you find a voice in a second language adds to your confidence to continue to build on this with a third language. I wish all of you the best of luck in your language pursuits! Please feel free to ask any questions.