Difficulties of Semitic!

[ILuvEire]

I love the idea of the difficulty index, so I'm going to do it for Hebrew and MSA.

Hebrew:
Grammar: 3
It's inflectional and there's a lot of inflection and agreement, but a lot of the difficulties of Semitic have sort of regulated themselves out, and like I've said, I think that all of the languages should be evaluated in relation to the others, so this is a good middling number to describe it. Although there is that damn dual...

Lexicon: 2
Pretty easy, words are very "foreign" but there are tons of loans and internationalisms, and when learning vocab genders are really, really easy to guess.

Pronunciation: 3
The only two sounds that will give you any trouble whatsoever will be /X/ and /R/, then there are some sort of complex initial clusters like /mX/ but they're not that bad.

Regularity: 2
There are only a handful of really irregular verbs, all the rest of it is just learning all the different classes. There's a vestigial dual that's sort of random, but then the plurals are almost totally regular.

MSA:
Grammar: 5
Arabic grammar is woefully complex. The genders are hard, the plurals are hard, inflection is hard, verb conjugation is hard. *Shudder*

Lexicon: 5
Definitely a 5, you've gotta memorize gender AND plural for every noun you learn because of that stupid broken plural. Then there are a handful of nouns that'll take the dual. Few internationalisms.

Pronunciation: 5
Pharyngeals. That's all I gotta say.

Regularity: 4
It's really a relatively regular language as far as the verbs go, you've just got to learn all the rules, then all the exceptions to the rules. But the exceptions have rules themselves, so it's not impossible.

[Meera]

Do Arabic dialects count as semtic? They are much eaiser and I wouldnt rate them as a five. MSA deffintly  five or above but Lebanese, Egyptian, Syrian, etc are fairly eaiser gramatically and pronication wise.

[ILuvEire]

They definitely do, and for all intents and purposes, the various dialects are really different languages. I don't see why you can't add them if you like 

[Meera]

yeah my arabic class at uni is focusing on Egyptian and MSA since thats what our text book is bases on. Egyptian is so much eaiser but my teacher said you dont really have to speak msa as long as you read/understand its good, bu speaking wise she told me you will sound like an idiot because no one speaks it. So she told me to speak in Eygptian when I asked her. She said in her opinion she thinks Egyptian sounds the best, although I think Lebanese does But they are much much eaiser then fus7a.

[Renaçido]

MSA:
Grammar: 5
Arabic grammar is woefully complex. The genders are hard, the plurals are hard, inflection is hard, verb conjugation is hard. *Shudder*

Lexicon: 5
Definitely a 5, you've gotta memorize gender AND plural for every noun you learn because of that stupid broken plural. Then there are a handful of nouns that'll take the dual. Few internationalisms.

Pronunciation: 5
Pharyngeals. That's all I gotta say.

Regularity: 4
It's really a relatively regular language as far as the verbs go, you've just got to learn all the rules, then all the exceptions to the rules. But the exceptions have rules themselves, so it's not impossible.

This is exactly why I hate the number system. ¬.¬

There's a lot of regularity in everything you mentioned (most nouns that are CaCC in the singular are CuCuuC in the plural, CaaCuuC in the singular are CawaaCiiC in the plural, those that are CaCaC take ’aCCaaC or CiCaaC in the plural...; all nouns take the dual and it's super-easy; gender is incredibly easy to figure out...), and all languages have nasty allophones to get used to. I really don't think the language deserves a 5 in all categories. :/

[Covered]

i'm scared of going on with my MSA study then 

[Meera]

i'm scared of going on with my MSA study then 

Don't worry, its not that scary!

[Covered]

yes it is, Meera

[Neqitan 2.0]

I've been studying MSA by myself for 1 year and a half, and it's certainly not as hard as people usually say. That's exactly what I tried to say in my post above, as putting all those categories with a level of 5 isn't fair at all. (Well, personally, I think the whole idea of trying to qualify the difficulty of learning languages with a star-system is very silly to begin with, but anyway...) It makes me think of how much experience they have with the language to be talking about it...