Speak Hebrew
Once you learn to speak Hebrew, what languages are easy to learn?
I plan on taking Hebrew classes throughout all 4 of my undergraduate years. I was just wondering what languages are easy to learn to speak Hebrew fluently?
Hebrew is a unique language in that it is considered to have been extinct (a language becomes extinct when it stops evolving: in its capacity as the liturgical language of Judaism it didn't evolve much) for centuries before being revived upon the founding of the state of Israel.
Modern Hebrew is actually based on an ancient form of the language, not any of the forms that continued to be used as a day-to-day vernacular by the Jews of the Middle East (European Jews tended to speak a "Jewish" form of a local language, the most prominent examples of these are Yiddish and Ladino). Because of this, Hebrew has evolved considerably less than its close relatives in the space of the last two millenniums. As a result, it hasn't developed some of the linguistic innovations that its relatives have, and it has retained some features that were lost in its close relatives.
These "close relatives" I've been mentioning are the Semitic languages. Arabic is the most prominent of these Semitic languages, and Maltese, the national language of Malta, is derived from a form of Tunisian Arabic brought to the islands by Saracen invaders during the middle ages.
The above answerer has also mentioned Aramaic. There is the biblical Aramaic of Jesus, and then there is Assyrian Neo-Aramaic which is a Semitic language still spoken by the Assyrian Christian minorities in Iraq, Syria, Iran and other parts of the world. Chaldean Neo-Aramaic is also another common modern form of the language.
There is another major Semitic language that often goes ignored. This is Amharic, the national language of Ethiopia. Amharic is spoken as a native language by 17.5 million Ethiopians, and over 25 million people in total. Amharic is a South Semitic language, so it will be considerably different from Hebrew, but not as different as a non-Semitic Afro-Asiatic language like Somali or Coptic.
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