"لَيْسَ هُناك لُغة صَعْبة."
Translation:There is no difficult language.
57 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
2710
Mandarin and Arabic, to an English speaker, are probably of roughly equivalent difficulty, albeit in completely different ways.
However for a lot of people other than native English speakers, as well as many English speakers themselves, Arabic is much easier. People who know Urdu, Farsi, or Turkish already know many Arabic words. This is also a little the case with Spanish and French speakers. Most importantly, however, Muslim people read prayers and the Qur'an in Arabic, as well as in their native languages, which is a kind of low-level immersion into the language that makes it much much easier as you then know many phrases with the words you are learning already.
1634
I think Chinese is simpler to manage as a beginner, while slightly harder to deepen than Arabic.
204
I'm learning it from English, too, but my native language is German. So I have to switch from one difficult and complex grammar to another :D
629
אשכרה יש לנו יתרון בשפה הערבית. אני רואה כאן אנשים מסתבכים עם השימוש ב-ה' הידיעה הערבית, ال, ובשבילינו זה פשוט טבעי. לא לדבר על סדר מילים במשפט או כמות המילים הדומות.
1096
I know. Just when you think you understand the structure it changes. Conjugation is starting to make sense. This gender thing though I think is not really necessary.
Well, almost every non English native speaker could claim the same, but why bother with double translations. Just follow the thinking and structures of the language you learn and the insight from your native language combined with English is uften helpful. Anyway I agree that weird English translations are often disturbing.
79
I am also a Hebrew native speaker, but the app is in English. So for a lot of sentences i have to translate them in my head from english to Arabic so I have the correct words ans then from Arabic to english to Hebrew to make sure i have the correct grammar and word order
1096
You have a benefit as both read backwards. :) I wonder who decided and when to change sentence direction. The Slavic languages are such tongue twisters.
933
It comes down to how the languages were written. The Semitic languages have been written for millennia, starting with Mesopotamian cuneiform. The stylus used to write cuneiform needed two hands, with the left hand often resting on the clay tablet for support. Were the language written left to right, this hand would likely smudge the wet clay to illegibility. When the Phoenician alphabet adapted to fit the Greek language, the Greeks often engraved stones, where smudging is irrelevant, and a boustrophedon style of writing developed; the first line went one way and the next one the other way. Again, the increase in use of ink pens prodded many European languages from left to right so as not to smudge the ink on the page, as now it was the right hand that was more likely to make contact with the writing surface.
1096
I'll give you that. Lived in Turkey for a year and a half in the early 70's. It seems the words have gotten longer. Why change the last letter of a noun to another still makes no sense. Can understand very basic. Arabic has become easier as I can read it pretty well. Can't always give the proper response but usually get the gist of what is being said.
556
Duolingo: "لَيْسَ هُناك لُغة صَعْبة."
Polish language and our 1000000 grammatical exceptions joined the chat.