Friday, August 07, 2009

Which Would You Choose?

I don't know where this is coming from, but I was thinking about it on the drive to work this morning. (Maybe it's because I'm currently listening to an audiobook called Simplexity that spends a chapter on how we learn languages.)

Let's say you want to learn a language other than your own. I mean you have an intense, burning desire to learn a language and you won't be satisfied until you learn one. You enroll in a class for the language of your choice. When you show up to your first meeting, the instructor says, "There's good news and bad news. The bad news first. We are only able to offer two languages: Spanish and Arabic. The good news is that they're free."

Which would you take? (Or would you take one at all?) Why?

2 comments:

Kelly Shaw's Book & Movie Forum said...

Arabic, definitely, primarily because I know nothing about it and I've had my fill of Spanish in high school and college.

Unknown said...

Spanish. More practical. More useful, especially if you live in the U.S. Easier to learn than Arabic. I know I've tried to learn both Arabic and Spanish at different points of my life.

With arabic you have to learn not only words and verb conjugations and grammar and different dialects depending on region, but you also have to learn entirely new characters, and not only new characters, but characters that appear slightly different depending on where they show up in beginning, middle, or end of the word. And then because it is a scripted language people can sometimes be loose with writing the letters so they are harder to recognize to an untrained eye. All of this makes for a much harder language to learn.