Dear Learn Chinese Readers:

The sponsor of this website, Hills Learning, has decided to start offering more than just Mandarin and other Asian language classes. Their new program is teaching Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic with spoken Eqyptian and other dialects.

Surprisingly, Mandarin and Arabic do have something in common, their difficulty. According to the Defense Language Institute’s rankings, both languages are Category IV languages:

http://www.dliflc.edu/about/languages-at-dliflc/

The languages also have similar interests for residents in New York (Hills Learning is located in NYC). Both languages have many people seeing the importance of them on the world stage in terms of business and politics. Both languages also have interests because of family ties or significant others from those countries.

After teaching Mandarin for many years, Hills Learning’s staff recognizes the importance of pronunciation of languages. Their Arabic Classes in NYC focus on the spoken part of the language, getting the consonants and vowels right. Although Arabic isn’t tonal it does have many sounds that are not familiar to English Speakers.

I hope this article was of interest to Chinese language learners, please contact us for any questions.