I started studying Arabic via Pimsleur (in my car).\u00a0 I’ve used Pimsleur before, and love the passive and easy way of learning.\u00a0\u00a0 I’ve studied several romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French) and some of them are very similar.\u00a0 If you know Spanish or Portuguese, you can pretty much understand the other language, to a lesser degree between Spanish and French.<\/p>\n
I was hoping that Arabic might be more similar to Hebrew than I’ve found.\u00a0 So far, I’m only only Lesson 10 of 30.\u00a0 The similarities I see are a lot of the “ach” – “ech” prefixes for “you”.\u00a0\u00a0 A short guttural sound “LA” means no, similar to “LO” in Hebrew; but they also have the words “MO” and “MU” for no and not.<\/p>\n
Some of the numbers are similar.\u00a0 May Arabic pronunication is still horrible – but ARBA for four, sounds about the same.\u00a0 Five is “CHUMSEI” instead of “CHUMASH”, nine is “TMINAH” instead of “SHMONEH”, and seven is “SABA” instead of “SHEVA”.\u00a0 So I see simlar patterns there, with sometimes just vowel substitutions, or an occasional consonant change.\u00a0 But the other numbers can be quite different.<\/p>\n
Verbs seem to also have a three character consonant roof.\u00a0 BAREF = I understand, TARFI – you understand (feminine), and TAREF – you understand masculine.<\/p>\n
I’ll keep you posted as I learn more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I started studying Arabic via Pimsleur (in my car).\u00a0 I’ve used Pimsleur before, and love the passive and easy way of learning.\u00a0\u00a0 I’ve studied several romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French) and some of them are very similar.\u00a0 If … Continue reading