Arabic Language Learning Difficulties

The Arabic language is quite a challenge to learn. Just consider some of the following:

--It is written from right to left.

--The script is completely different from Latin script.

--A letter is written differently, depending on whether it is initial in a word, in the middle, or final.

--Short vowels are omitted in standard text, ensuring that readers have to know in advance how a word is pronounced before they can read it.

--Standard Arabic contains some guttural sounds not found in English or other languages. And some are pretty difficult to pronounce.

--Plurals of nouns are irregular and unpredictable, needing to be memorized in advance.

--There are a myriad of different verb forms, each with its own special rules of conjugation.

--Verbs are conjugated by a combination of prefixes, suffixes, and changing vowels and doubling consonants within the roots.

--Unlike English, which shares a great deal of vocabulary affinity with related tongues like French, Spanish, Latin, Italian, Dutch, and German, Arabic belongs to a completely different language family. As such, a learner cannot "cheat" by building up vocabulary from cognates or discern meanings from familiar root forms that cross from other languages to English.

--Arabic as it is routinely spoken varies greatly from country to country, and diverges as well from the standard literary form used in radio and TV. Hence, for example, the multiple transliterations of Libyan's Gadhafi (or Qaddafy, etc.) largely reflect differences in local pronunciation.

--The quality of instructional material for studying Arabic often leaves a lot to be desired. For example, I recently bought a pack of 1000 Vis-Ed Arabic vocabulary cards. You might think that they would have had enough sense to either transliterate the Arabic text into Latin script or insert the traditional Arabic diacritics to indicate short vowels and doubled consonants in their words, but then you would be mistaken. And there are too many Arabic textbooks that also fall short in omitting the needed short vowels from the words they introduce in their lessons.

--Words in traditional Arabic-English dictionaries are ordered by root and not pronunciation, making finding whatever word you're looking for often very difficult.

--Doing anything on the computer in Arabic necessitates a completely different script and keyboard template.

So in studying Arabic, I am facing quite a few hurdles. But that's O.K., I suppose. I did find a different vocabulary card set that gives the Latin transliteration for each word, along with diacritic marks. And the textbook I study, Teach Yourself Arabic, has both the Latin transliterations for their vocabulary and a word glossary at the end arranged in a reasonable manner. I can pick up BBC in Arabic on the computer, not that I can understand what's being said yet. So I do have some things going for me in my endeavor to learn Arabic. One obstacle, though, stands firmly in my way: time!