Many times I have heard the claim that Arabic is the easiest of languages.
Despite the fact that there is no Islamic text in existence which truly states such a thing, for other reasons this claim is
demonstrably false[/u].
While Arabic may be a relatively "easy" language as compared with some of the more tricky ones, it is nevertheless by
no means the easi
est. I can tell you this from my own experience as a language learner. For example, for study purposes I am also well familiar with the Hebrew language. I for one can tell you that without any shadow of a doubt, among Semitic languages Old Hebrew is
substantially and
significantly simpler and easier to learn than Old Arabic is.
- Hebrew has a smaller amount of derived verb forms.
- Hebrew has a FAR smaller number of verb conjugations.
- Hebrew has significantly less noun patterns, with a far simpler plural system which contains comparitively very few broken plurals at all.
- Hebrew apparently has
almost no actual case inflection at all!
- On top of all that, Hebrew is slightly easier when it comes to pronunciation (no ? or ?!!!).
- Hebrew orthography is also far easier than its Arabic counterpart.
Old Hebrew is not really any more difficult than colloquial Arabic, and far easier than
? for the above stated reasons.
Hebrew is just one example. There are many other languages which are demonstrably easier in almost every way than classical Arabic. All this considered, why is it that some people insist upon this very baseless and untrue assertion?
