The number of university students who choose to learn Arabic is tiny, even among the already small foreign language departments. At my university, there is around 38,000 students and less than 150 of them study Arabic. In case you’re wondering, that’s 0.03%.
First let’s look at the facts:
Around 420 million people speak Arabic, making it the sixth most spoken language in the world.
It’s an official language of 28 countries.
It’s one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
Just the number of Arabic speakers in the world makes it clear that learning Arabic can open up all kinds of doors in terms of employment, or even just a new group of friends. Not only is it clearly useful, but it can make you stand out from the crowd. Not many people choose to study Arabic and so it makes people curious. It shows them that you’re willing to take on a challenge.
But is it worth it?
A simple answer to this question is that learning Arabic (beyond a few basic phrases) certainly isn’t for everyone. It takes a lot of time and effort to learn a language that shares almost nothing with English, and the differences between different dialects of Arabic mean that it is in fact several languages under the guise of one.
So why did I choose to study Arabic?
I’ve been asked this question by practically everyone I’ve ever spent more than ten minutes talking to. I chose to study Arabic because I already had a love for foreign languages and wanted to try something completely new – I wanted a challenge. Arabic definitely gives me that, but that’s not why I’ve fallen in love with it. What makes learning Arabic truly worthwhile is that it gives you a chance to use language in a was that is impossible in English, and it introduces you to one of the most open and generous cultures in the world. Never have people gone out of their way to make me feel at home like they do in the Middle East.
If you want to get to know a wonderful culture and a people that will truly bend over backwards to bring you into their world, then I can’t encourage you enough to try arabic. Yes it can be difficult, and sometimes it makes me feel as if I’m going backwards instead of forward. But it’s worth it.
The Arabic word that is often used for hello is “merhaba”. The literally translation of this word is not hello, but welcome.
Multilingual Reader 