Mandatory Arabic?

[Roo]

"Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music, and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers, and warriors." - Hunter S.Thompson

[sgreger1]

I learned some of the most basic arabic phrases when I was in the army as part of our general training. The problem for me is that it is written with a different set of symbol's/ABC's. Learning something like spanish is easy because the conjugation is similar and all you really have to do is learn the spanish counterpart to each english word and you'll be fine. With arabic it is actually an entire different language, wrtten with completely foreign symbols. When they taught us, they give the phonetic spelling of everything, so I could say any 1 phrase pretty accurately, but had no real understanding of even how to use proper conjugationor anything like that.

[Maher]

I learned some of the most basic arabic phrases when I was in the army as part of our general training. The problem for me is that it is written with a different set of symbol's/ABC's. Learning something like spanish is easy because the conjugation is similar and all you really have to do is learn the spanish counterpart to each english word and you'll be fine. With arabic it is actually an entire different language, wrtten with completely foreign symbols. When they taught us, they give the phonetic spelling of everything, so I could say any 1 phrase pretty accurately, but had no real understanding of even how to use proper conjugationor anything like that.

True, Arabic is written from right to left and the character set is different with so many variations to each character, it is hard to learn, each character has two, three and some have 4 different shapes that change depending on where it is used in a word, fascinating, if you know what you are doing .

It is now an asset if you know Arabic and want to join the army, here in Canada you get more money if you know Arabic

[Joe234]

هل أنت من الخرطوم في السودان؟

لا. أنا من ولاية أوريغون