7 things I learnt about Arabic
After only 4 weeks of Arabic classes, I feel like a whole new world has opened up (yes that was an Aladdin-reference and yes I know it’s lame). So here are the 7 things I’ve learnt about the Arabic language that would’ve helped me a lot if I had known before.
1. The numbers.
As everyone knows, in Europe we use the Arabic numbers. So I thought “yay that’s one thing I already know!”. But NO: Arabic language uses the Hindi numbers!
WHY THO 😥
2. Arabic is written from right to left, most people know that. But did you know that numbers and also a phone number are still written from left to right?
That means, you switch reading-directions in the middle of a sentence. If I give you my number in Arabic and it’s wrong, it won’t necessarily mean I’m not interested – this is just very confusing!!
3. I spent a lot of time in my English class trying to explain the meaning of “TO BE”. And now I found out that verb simply doesn’t exist in Arabic! So you don’t say “I am Thalia”, it’s “I Thalia” or “She my sister” – Moria-English suddenly makes way more sense!
4. The Alphabet consists of 27 consonants and one vowel that can be pronounced either as A, I or U. They also don’t have the letter P.
5 In Arabic you do not write (short) vowels. You can put signs on the letters to know which vowels you should say after a consonant, but usually nobody does that. So trying to read Arabic is a lttl bt lk txtng or mkng a crsswrd pzzl*
* (a little bit like texting or making a crossword puzzle).
Can I please start crying now?
6. Arabic does not have the word “it” or an indefinite article (a/an). The only article it has is “AL”, doesn’t matter if the word is male or female. But again, that explains Moria-English so much better!
7. The word “Taliban” means “students”,
“Assad” means “Lion”,
“Zara” means “throne”.
The Spanish word “usted” (meaning “you” in a formal way) means ” professor” in Arabic.
The dutch word “cijfer” is derived from the Arabic word “cifr”, meaning “zero”.
And suddenly the world made sense again!
