Unless people need to learn a foreign language for business or for family reasons , they do not usually choose one that is completely different from their own. But if, after all, you decided to study a language Chinese or Arabic, what difficulties would you have?Anyone who studies Chinese has to learn Chinese writing. This developed from pictures that used to represent objects and actions. Over the centuries , these were made simpler and can no longer be recognised.They are now called characters. You must be familiar with about 4,000 characters to read most Cinese texts. These are traditinally written in columns.
Each character on the page represents one spoken syllable and these are put together to make words.
Students of Chinese make a lot of mistakes because the meaning of a word changes depending on exactly how someone is saying it. The word (mao,) for example, can mean either cat, hat or spear.!Arabic is also a difficult language to learn. Athough there are many dialects, most students learn Modern Standard Arabic, which sounds formal to Arab ears, but is understood everywhere. They are unlikely to have problems watching TV programmes or reading newspapers, but they may have trouble understanding a conversation between two Arabs who are speaking their own dialect.
Arabic script looks difficult, but when students have learnt the twenty-eight basic letter shapes,there are some rules that help them to write correctly. Words are written from right to left in horizontal lines and the shape of each letter changes depending on its position in the world. Only the consonants are represented by letters.That is symbols above and below the letters are used to show the vowel sounds.
Whichever language you chose, learning it would certainly be an impressive achievement and very useful in today's multi-cultural society.
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