{"id":4411,"date":"2015-10-05T17:27:58","date_gmt":"2015-10-05T16:27:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eurotalk.com\/blog\/?p=4411"},"modified":"2015-10-05T17:27:58","modified_gmt":"2015-10-05T16:27:58","slug":"arabic-are-you-up-for-the-challenge-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/arabic-are-you-up-for-the-challenge-too\/","title":{"rendered":"Arabic: are you up for the challenge too?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After seeing how amazing our Junior Language Challenge semi-finalists were at learning <strong>Mandarin<\/strong>, we&#8217;ve set our 33\u00a0finalists the new challenge of learning&#8230;\u00a0<strong>Arabic<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/eurotalk.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/2015-09-17-14.32.58.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-4416\" style=\"margin-top: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px;\" src=\"https:\/\/eurotalk.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/2015-09-17-14.32.58.jpg\" alt=\"Junior Language Challenge semi-finals\" width=\"556\" height=\"370\" data-wp-pid=\"4416\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Over 250 million people speak Arabic, across 22 countries. There are a number of different dialects within Arabic, including Moroccan, Classical, Lebanese, Gulf and Egyptian. Modern Standard Arabic is understood across the Arab world, and is used widely across different publications.<\/p>\n<h3>Is Arabic as different to English as it looks?<\/h3>\n<p>There are several similarities between Arabic and English:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The punctuation marks are used in the same way &#8211; however, in Arabic these can look very different; the question mark in Arabic is reversed, compared to the English way of writing a question mark.<\/li>\n<li>There are some Arabic words that have contributed to the English language, such as succar, which is \u2018sugar\u2019 in English.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The differences between English and Arabic make the language rather difficult to learn.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Arabic letters look completely different to the English alphabet.<\/li>\n<li>These letters are also written right to left, instead of left to right. This means that the front of the book in Arabic would be considered the back in English.<\/li>\n<li>Sentence structures also differ to English, with the adjectives coming after the noun. For example, we would say the \u2018blue car\u2019, whereas in Arabic it would be \u2018car blue\u2019.<\/li>\n<li>Unlike English, Arabic only has 3 vowels and these have differentiations. Many words in Arabic start with a consonant followed by another consonant, and again like vowels, these have differentiations too. Another difference is that Arabic doesn\u2019t have any capital letters; instead they use quotation marks to emphasise letters instead.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Although Arabic may seem like a difficult language to learn, it is one of the eight most spoken languages in the world. Hopefully with enough practice before the Junior Language Challenge, our finalists won\u2019t be thinking \u2018Ana La Afham\u2019 (I don\u2019t understand) or \u2018Annajdah\u2019 (help)! I am sure our finalists will be just as fabulous at Arabic, as they were with Portuguese and Mandarin. If you\u2019re going to the <a href=\"https:\/\/languageshowlive.co.uk\" target=\"_blank\">Language Show<\/a>\u00a0on Friday 16th October, and you&#8217;d like to see how great our finalists are at learning Arabic, come and find us in room 3 (level 3).<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/eurotalk.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/image1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-4417\" style=\"margin-top: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px;\" src=\"https:\/\/eurotalk.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/image1.jpg\" alt=\"Learning Arabic with uTalk\" width=\"406\" height=\"541\" data-wp-pid=\"4417\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>And if you&#8217;d like to learn Arabic yourself, you can download our <a href=\"https:\/\/utalk.com\/app\" target=\"_blank\">uTalk<\/a> app to get started for free!<\/p>\n<p>Alex<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After seeing how amazing our Junior Language Challenge semi-finalists were at learning Mandarin, we&#8217;ve set our 33\u00a0finalists the new challenge of learning&#8230;\u00a0Arabic. Over 250 million people speak Arabic, across 22 countries. There are a number of different dialects within Arabic, including Moroccan, Classical, Lebanese, Gulf and Egyptian. Modern Standard Arabic is understood across the Arab &#8230; <a title=\"Arabic: are you up for the challenge too?\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/arabic-are-you-up-for-the-challenge-too\/\" aria-label=\"More on Arabic: are you up for the challenge too?\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[606,1056],"tags":[118,32,145,2],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4411"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4411\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utalk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}