Arabic or Russian? Russian or Arabic? Which class should I sign up for? There are pros and cons for each. My current Arabic vocabulary is limited to “Thank you” and “I have trouble”. My current Russian vocabulary is limited to “Yes”, “No”, “Thank you”, and “Goodbye”.
“Thank you” is something one should be able to say regardless of what else one might learn. At least in my opinion.
After listening to a podcast of introductory lessons for both Arabic and Russian, my mouth can fit around Russian pronunciation much better than Arabic pronunciation. In the first podcast, I managed to pronounce correctly Привет and Здравствуйте. Those are two forms of hello. Informal and formal. My Russian-speaking husband approved but thought there was too much T sound in my second hello.
My theory is that if my mouth can form Russian words then Arabic shouldn’t be much further up the vocabulary ladder. Or maybe I should switch my sights to Mandarin instead.
شكرا and До свидания.
For Pete Sake!
3 weeks ago
Arabic is harder to learn in my opinion, because you have to learn modern standard and ammiyya, and the number of dialects are vast.
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