[Spirochete]

Reading Arabic 'hard for brain'

Well, yes - it looks like writhing snakes.

[TigersEye]

The Black Speech of Mordor kills brain cells.

[MestaMachine]

“Ultimately, they would like to work out how to teach Arabic reading better to children, including helping them to tell letters apart and how to remember which sound goes with which letter.”

Why? Immersion in arabic shuts down the right hemisphere and renders it unusable after a time. It causes permanent brain damage.
Just look at obama. That is why clerics must learn the koran in the original arabic and they are incapable of logic or abstract thinking and have no sense of chronology.

[Myrddin]

It doesn't help that the language is written right to left, always in script and containing letters with initial, medial and finial forms. Comprehensively written Arabic has all the vowel marks included. Colloquial printed Arabic as used in newspapers omits the vowel marks. As in English, a practiced reader can discern the correct meaning even with omissions. "If u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb". A new learner has to contend with learning the syntax and semantics of the spoken language AND a new written script. That's a big wall to climb. Arabic also adds the complexity of being different depending on the gender of the person addressed and implementing this variant by inflection within a word. Asking a female if she understands Arabic is (phonetically) intee tarfee Aribee. Directed to a male it becomes, intave tarfee Aribee. The "r" is always "rolled or flapped".

I find Mandarin Chinese to be much easier to handle than Arabic. At least for the spoken language. The pictographs are a huge learning curve by themselves, but actually independent of the spoken language. The written form is understood by Mandarin and Cantonese speakers, yet their spoken language is vastly different.

[Azeem]

Arabic is not especially hard, just different. Unlike English, the letters that are written are pronounced. The lack of written short vowels is difficult at first but once you learn the root word and measures system, you can begin to pick out the pattern. There are only a handful of letters not used in the English alphabet. Most of them are just pronounced in the back of the throat.

The colloquial language can be even easier or more difficult, depending on the region. However, English beats any language in the use of colloquial terms.

اللغة العربية ليس صعبة.

[Allegra]

I speak a little Arabic, but aside from numbers, I can't read it at all. I know what my name looks like from business cards that are English on one side and Arabic on the other and I have a cartouche.

I haven't tried to learn...I guess I could if I felt the need.

But I don't. ;-)

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Nachum.

[child to father in 2050] “Dad, what was ‘Arabic’?”