Farsi vs. Arabic

[kekekekekekeke]

I recently started taking Persian classes. I'm thinking about learning Arabic in Egypt or the UAE.

How comparable are these two languages? How is the pronunciation and the vocabulary similar or different? Should I try learning Arabic at the same time as Persian or would that not be the best idea?

Thanks

Comments

[wiped]

How comparable are these two languages?

they are written with the same script, and about 30-50% of modern persian vocabulary is derived from arabic. the similarities end there; persian is indo-european (in the same family as english or french); arabic is afro-asiatic (in the same family as hebrew or somali). so other than writing and some vocabulary, they are about as dissimilar as english and chinese.

How is the pronunciation and the vocabulary similar or different?the pronounciation is similar in some ways (they have a large shared phonetic inventory) and different in others. persian has a lot of the same phonemes as english (as you've probably seen in your class, most of the sounds are very easy to make, with the possible exception of 'kh' or 'gh'). arabic pronounciation, in my opinion, is REALLY difficult. there are all these emphatic consonants that i have still yet to master. when i try to pronounce arabic, i sound like i'm trying to yodel while being strangled. it's definitely challenging

[oakwonder]

Yodelling while being strangled: very good description. Possibly more accurate than my conception of Arabic as arguing with angry camels.

[zubird]

"bad" is Persian for "bad"? that's awesome. is it a real cognate, or just a coincidence?

[wiped]

if i had a persian etymological dictionary (*glares angrily at publishing companies*) i'd look it up. i don't know whether it's a genuine cognate or not. it's used in about a zillion persian words, though.

[wiped]

p.s. just a nitpicky pet peeve of mine, but it's 'persian', not 'farsi'.

[kekekekekekeke]

Thanks for your reply. I think I'll focus on Persian for now.

[gwailogavin]

Not to argue about semantics, but I find it odd that your avatar features a kogyaru (or a yamamba, or a biichi-kei mamba, whatever you want to call her), and is subtitled with something Korean internetophiles are stereotyped with saying (and something that a Japanese person wouldn't even understand, never mind say/write!)

Is that, perhaps, intentional??

[oakwonder]

I agree with wiped: Persian is easy grammatically and easy to pronounce. Arabic is difficult in both respects. An important point is that, though Persian has a huge admixture of Arabic vocabulary, you can ignore that fact. They're just words in Persian: just as in English it doesn't matter that war, wind, time, answer are from one source and colour, space, battle, reply are from another. No knowledge of French or Latin is required for English, and no knowledge of Arabic is required for Persian. (The only real effect it has is that some nouns optionally take Arabic plurals - this complicates Persian grammar, but you can just ignore it and use Persian plurals anyway

[qalanjo]

I found Persian much easier than Arabic. Easier to read/write and the words are easier to pronounce, in my opinion. I tried taking Arabic with another language at the same time (in school) and failed miserably. Arabic is really difficult if you can't spend adequate time on it, which I couldn't. Good luck ;)

[optimussven]

Your questions about Persian vs. Arabic seem to have been answered and I agree. But I just thought that I'd leave a note saying:

Don't study Arabic in the UAE. It's a waste of time since hardly anybody that you'll have daily interaction with in the country speaks Arabic.