Which alphabet is harder to master, Arabic or Hebrew?

Question

Which alphabet is harder to master, Arabic or Hebrew?

Answer 1

Arabic is more difficult for me.

Answer 2

Arabic is harder because many letters have different forms depending  on whether the letter is standing alone, is at the beginning, is at the middle or at the end of a word.  Also there are some letters that can be mistaken for others even with the inclusion of the dots, which is supposed to cut down on that.

Note however, if you learn the alphabets from a source such as Wikipedia's history of the alphabet, it makes it easier.  There you will see that the first "Semitic" alphabet and its letter order determined all the others.  Once you learn the conjectured hyroglyphics that are supposed to have been used for each letter and how they got transform to their modern forms.  After that it's kind of easy to learn all the closely related alphabets, mainly Hebrew, Arabic, Greek and Cyrillic and see their relationship to our Western Latin alphabet.

It's pretty cool and makes you feel powerful to be able to sound out all those signs you see in the news from around the world.

Answer 3

I would say Arabic because many of the letters have multiple forms depending on position (initial, medial, final, isolated) and Arabic is written in a cursive style.

On the other hand, the Hebrew system does not have the different forms because the standard alphabet is not written cursively.  Only 5 Hebrew letters have an alternative final form.  The Hebrew diacritics and niqqud may complicate things a bit.

If you'd like, you can check the difference in size of the charts of letters for each:

Arabic chart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alph...

Hebrew chart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_alph...

Hope that sheds some light.

Answer 4

i think arabic is more difficult but hebrew texts suggest truth!

Answer 5

I haven't learned Hebrew but Arabic is hard. It's confusing and it gives me a headache. lol