Arabic Language: The Attitude, Motive And Difficulty

Everyone wants to learn Arabic should, initially, review his attitude towards Arabic, inspect his motives and find out if it is really difficult or not. This article is to help a non-Arab to, objectively, explore his way before starting learning Arabic.

What is your psychological attitude to Arabic?

An attitude is a hypothetical construct that represents an individual`s like or dislike for an item. Attitudes are positive, negative or neutral views of an "attitude object": i.e. a person, behavior or event. We can safely add language to the attitude subjects list.

Although most attitudes of individuals are developed as a result of observational learning from their environment, some attitudes are affective while others are cognitive. Affective attitudes may be tolerated during childhood, but when grown up, individuals who adopt an objective look to the world around them review their affective attitudes in search of reasoning behind, and finally, they either keep or drop any affective attitude. This way, a grown up individual possesses a reliable measure with which attitudes can be correctly and accurately assessed.

Taking into consideration that Arabic language is the mother tongue of all Arabs and the language of the Holy Quran, the sacred book of all Muslims, it is almost impossible to learn Arabic without the Islamic and Arabic cultures in mind. Therefore, individuals with negative attitudes to Arabs or to the Islamic culture may face a real problem in learning Arabic unless they objectively get rid of those biased affective negative attitudes or impressions and be realistic enough and unbiased.

What are your motives to learn Arabic?

After reviewing your attitude towards Arabic and getting rid of illogically biased impressions, you should inspect your motive/ motives to learn the language. There are two types of motives that push people to learn any language:

Motives of Purpose: Such as having a job, passing an exam needed for a certain study, communicating with different people during an entertainment or business trip or any other limited religious or cultural purpose or benefit. In this case, the learner exclusively study a certain language to the limit by which he or she can achieve the target put in his or her mind and nothing more.

Motives of Integration: These motives push the learner to understand and practice a language of other people living in a different country or even a different continent in order to establish a kind of integration between his or her own culture and the culture of the people of that language. This learner is usually a broad minded person, has wide spectrum of knowledge and is never a fanatic. He or she respects and integrates with the people and the culture of the learnt language without necessarily adopting that culture.

Modern studies showed that people with motives of integration are more capable to master a new language than those of motives of purpose.

Finding out and understanding your own motives pushing you to learn Arabic may help you learn it better.

Is Arabic really a difficult language?

Arabic is one of the widely spoken languages in the world. It is spoken by more than three hundred Millions of Arabs and is known to all Muslims all over the world. But people who have never studied Arabic before may find it difficult to decipher those strange signs, characters and sounds called Arabic.

Arabic may look difficult because of shortage of modern attractive teaching methods and facilities that stimulate interest among learners, but it is not difficult in itself.

It is also a sad indictment for all Arab countries that most Non-Arab expatriates who work several years in the Middle East return home without grasping any real knowledge of Arabic due to negligence of the Arab governments, and because the Arab educated individuals pay more attention to foreign languages, particularly English, rather than their own mother tongue.

I know some Non-Arab expatriates whose limited Arabic vocabularies were gained during their work in the desert or rural areas with uneducated Bedouins or villagers.

Many western scholars and orientalists studied Arabic and translated many volumes of old Arabic manuscri pts into their mother tongues including English, French, German and Spanish. In their writings, they wondered of the affluence, flexibility, wholeness and adaptability of Arabic. Let us read what those scholars wrote:

Freitag ⁽¹⁾ said: “Arabic is the most affluent language”.

William Work said: “Arabic is so flexible language that it adapts easily with contemporaneous changes”.

Ernest Renan ⁽²⁾ said: “Arabic was suddenly born in a state of wholeness and perfection. It has neither childhood nor senility, and this is very odd in the history of mankind”.

Although learning any foreign language, including Arabic, requires efforts and perseverance, the good news is that as soon as the learner acquires the fundamental knowledge of Arabic, he or she will be on the right track since the grammar laws of Arabic are logical and steady, and there is always a connection between words and their derivatives.

Most of Non-Arab Muslims easily learn Arabic at a very early age (at the Madrasah) just to be able to recite the Holy Quran as a matter of worshipping but, unfortunately, they do not know the meaning of what they recite unless they read a translation of the meanings of the Quran in their native languages.

Arabic today is the official language of all Arab countries, and it is one of the recognized languages in the United Nations. As for the Internet, it is gaining a better position as per number of users every day.

So, it is a myth to say that learning Arabic is difficult.

Have a good time with Arabic.

Youssef Abdel-Naiem

⁽¹⁾ German orientalist (1788– 1861)

⁽²⁾ Ernest Renan, French philosopher and writer (1823– 1892)

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