Why is Arabic so difficult to learn? 

"non-standard Arabic dialects are never written, except x, y, z..." sounds an awful like if you were trying to learn zoology, and were told "english, non-scientific names of animals are never used in literature, except...", and then list a thousand different casual ways saying "cat" is acceptable over "cattus felis".

The Qur'an isn't the only reason the Arab world holds on to MSA, nor does Islam look down on other languages. Arabs have centuries of rich literary and poetic tradition in Classical Arabic that's been a key feature of Arab culture. The Qur'an is the biggest example of that

Oooof, I felt this video in my soul. I studied Arabic back in 2010 and it was a struggle. The material for dialect felt a lot less available back then so I mostly know Fusha with minimal Iraqi

I’m a native Arabic speaker (Egyptian) and I was actually born in the west so having both Arabic and English as native languages means my brain thinks in both. I’m now trying to teach my Italian husband hahaha

as an Atheist Arab who does not care about QUran, I still think MSA is important, if you understand MSA you can learn any Arabic dialect easilly, because dialects cange and evolve around the standard (MSA) and keep borrowing from it, and reverting to it. my grandma once talked to me in the dialect of her village, with politics out of the way it would be like 2-3 hours car ride to her village, and I did not understand her dialect at all, because the dialects die. each region has a dialect, each part of the region has an accent, each city/village have their own quirk on the accent, each group of people have some (inside) words, and all these differences evolve and die in few generations, and keep revolving around MSA. one final note, MSA sounds more Shakespearean than middle English, people will look at you like (Thor) from his first movie when he spoke with a shakespeare-like accent in an American diner.... weird and funny, but I remember learning that dialect in English classes at school, and it helpe me understand differennt dialects and accents of English much better.

Having a common language that goes along with one's native language and lets them communicate with people in other countries is nifty , but it certainly must be difficult when so many people who aren't familiar with this specific system conflate that common (and additionally archaic and formal) language with the ones people use for communication.

9 minutes and 56 seconds into a video about linguistic aspects of arab dialects: "Now, for the nerds here." Optimistic that anyone else is still watching :)

Neat video! About the cases, you are right about them not being written often, that doesn't mean phrases are not read as if the cases are there. In fact, you learn to read with them and then intuitively place them correctly without them being there. I honestly wish the use of cases in literature would go mainstream since it preserves proper parsing; a quality that's withering by the day.

You should have way more views!

High quality videos, i love your channel already. Do you have any resources for learning Levantine besides college? I work for a lovely Lebanese family and would like to learn some of their language

Damn what are the odds of finding another Pitt ling student on youtube? We probably crossed paths, I graduated in 2021. Great videos keep it up

Very informational video. I am a half-Yemeni who was born in Qatar, and I rarely talked to my dad in Arabic. I had very little chance to pick up the Yemeni dialect from him, and instead I picked up a lot of features of different dialects from different people in different schools. Up until like a year ago, when I started trying to learn MSA using Rosetta Stone (it worked but I don't practice enough nowadays unfortunately), I would use a mix of different dialects that would be incomprehensible to almost anyone when I tried to speak Arabic. The result nowadays is that I have basic understanding of some dialects, but I can only speak in Modern Standard with some of the more archaic features thrown away and maybe a common word from a dialect here and there.

It's like if you are embarrassed and you try to say that in Spanish thinking is the same word and you say, "Estoy embarazada." Say that and you WILL be embarrassed.

I would love to see the 1500-word list that you've used to calculate the lexical similarity!

Wow this makes me feel better about Chinese's dialect situation, which is not nearly as discouraging.

Euskera is literally so alike to what you say. Euskara batua is the oficial and standard version, but every town, city and village has its own dialect. For example there are Bizkaiera, Gipuzkera, Zuberoera, Behe Nafarrera, Goi Nafarrera and Arabera (extinct). In every one of those there are at least 20-50 different dialect zones and many more not contacted/examinated/studied. Euskera is so rich that we have a especific word for our dialects: euskalki.

Some letters or sounds in Iraqi are not even found in MSA so i use some Persian letters instead like گ پ چ

Hello. Thanks for the video :) I just wanted to point out that it would be easier to listen to if you could just put a bit more pause between your sentences or try to speak a little bit slower. Great content and keep going :)

I just stumbled on your channel and I’m loving it, thank you so much I’m so glad the algorithm worked

Well, about the pre-Hebrew and pre-Arabic languages being split, it is worth to mention that Hebrew ceased being used as a spoken language ~2500 years ago, and until fairly recently it was "frozen in time", so to speak, and did not really evolve that much during that time

I always imagined it to be similar to the situation of Medieval Europe where Latin was used as a standard formal / written language, while the every day spoken Latin is just Romance languages as they existed at the time. Would that be a fair comparison?

Criminally underrated. This channel is a gem!

great content my dude. i know this has been mentioned by another commenter, but wanted to say that it would probably be helpful to viewers if your verbal pacing were slowed a bit. i usually increase the playback speed on youtube but i have to slow it down for your videos. you've got a ton of interesting stuff to say! let it breathe :)

I had a friend from Persia. He got a good grasp of Arabic in about six weeks since the two writing systems are the same.

You'll find that the language used by deeply religious or learned people is usually a mix between their dialectal Arabic and MSA, if not totally MSA (which is always something non-religious or slightly anti-religious media likes to poke fun at). And besides that, you'll often find people who read a lot quoting poetry/Quran/Hadith or just anything in MSA, and incorporating MSA words and structure into their speech, sometimes even tl be humorous.

Very informative and interesting video! Subscribed

I wonder if that bread vs meat thing is at all related to something I got out of a recent RobWords video where he explained that in Old English, the word that became meat just meant food.

super helpful video, I think I'm too scared to try this at all

I am surprised you find Slavic grammar harder than Icelandic grammar! Masculine noun declension is super irregular in Icelandic. Russian case endings look relatively straight-forward in comparison, no? Is it the Slavic verb conjugation that trips you off then?

Arabic actually has easy grammar to get started in normal conversations. Arabic at its higher levels though, is absolutely insane in complexity and I don’t think I have seen any language with a higher learning ceiling for advanced learners than Arabic.

do you plan to make a video on Polish? what you've found interesting, what you particularly struggled with etc.

its not because msa is old but because it's intellectual and formal. think of it like speaking classical latin like cicero while ordering coffee

the mimation in 7:00 remeinds me of akkadian lol semitic family resemblance or luck?

Very decent video, for your comment about cases and them being necessary, in fact are very necessary and important to pronounce right because even if they dont matter that much when written, they matter a lot when spoken and heard, the whole meaning of a sentence can become awkward or even reversed if you mistake cases when you speak, also, cases exist in every dialect, they're just not written, you just pronounce them. Also concerning dialects, a lot of the regional dialects are affected during the occupation of these regions by europe, for example, Tunisia and algeria use french a lot in their dialect, Egyptians use english etc.. which is why regional dialects are so hard to master if you havent grown in said region.

You have an occassional or near sibilance. I really enjoy the way you express yourself however so simply note. Do you have a Discord or email or something? I might like to talk languages with you sometime.

Actually using the -و suffix is used in Jordan and southern Palestine by some people. Not uncommon. Also in defense of teaching MSA is that the fact that dialects have not been officially codified leads to a very large degree of fluidity even between speakers of the same dialect. It’s much harder to tell if something is “wrong” or “right” in dialects because usually you have to just rely on your gut sense, which can be different for different people. One example was that I wanted to see if Palestinian Arabic had the same distinction between animate and inanimate objects in the plural and I came up with three different formulations depending on who I asked. It’s not that you can make more mistakes in dialect it’s more that you can make certain kinds of mistakes but not others.

Irish has a similar system to Arabic with dialects and the standard, the standard is a much more strictly regulated entity that's reserved for formal writing and mayhaps school but it has no official pronunciation at least. The difference between it and the dialects isn't so huge but like at the same time it's a pain in the ass sometimes

I don't think that the late middle English comparison you offered is fair, since MSA is heard much more often in an average Arab's life via cartoons, school, the news and documentaries, historical TV programs and then the Quran. The closest comparison in regards to exposure would be Shakespearean English since we all have to endure his literature at some point in high school, although much less than MSA. After all, most of us are not watching TV in Shakespearean English. Spongebob in fus7a, however, was the most popular cartoon in the Middle East at one point.

Stupid me... Having learned Moroccan Arabic a few years ago, I thought that I would be able to communicate with Arabs. I absolutely wasn't...

Chinese in the 1900s, essentially, without standardisation of any spoken variety. The situation after one spoken variety was made standard is complicated.

Nice video! What dialect would you recommend? I'm learning MSA but also want to learn at least 1 (god save my brain).

I need your help. I'm a native English speaker who has only ever studied Spanish in a classroom setting and I'm torn between choosing to learn Russian or Arabic for a year abroad. I'm equally drawn to both, but I think I might be drawn more to Russian now because it seems less complex to learn. What should I do? (For context I'd be learning part Moroccan Arabic and MSA)

Well, that was quite informative, thank you. My take on it is this, after having lived eight years in Masr, or Egypt. Unless you have a particular connection to an Arabic speaking country or plan to go live or work there, then of course choose that country’s dialect. If however you are in neither of these two cases, my advice would be to go for Egyptian Arabic, because by and large most people in most Arabic speaking places understand that dialect. As is said in the video, this is because the vast majority of films and TV programs in Arabic are produced in Egypt, where that dialect is used. The only drawback to this is that Egyptians are (I think) the only ones to pronounce ‘g’ where everyone else says ‘dj’. So Egyptian ‘gabal’ (mountain) is in other dialects ‘djabal’ or ‘djebel’. And likewise ragel vs radjul (man), gumhuriya vs djamhariya (republic), etc. Note that vowels tend to be unstable across dialects, but this doesn’t matter much in a language that is strongly consonant-based. I remember that for Egyptian school kids learning MSA at school was almost like learning a foreign language. E.g. ‘bread’ in MSA is khubz while in Egyptian it is ‘aysh. Heaps like these. But as the video says, MSA is justified as a way to better understand the Qur’an al kareem. To appreciate this, we can remember that traditionally the whole Qur’an or large parts of it were learnt by heart without the students understanding much of what they were reciting.

كو suffix also used in Egypt

When it comes to the time divergence between Arabic and Hebrew, wouldn't they actually be closer than you had implied in the video? Modern Hebrew didn't evolve from old Hebrew over time, but was rather suddenly revived using Biblical Hebrew in a very short amount of time. Obviously, modern Hebrew does diverge from Biblical Hebrew quite a bit, but that is more due to influences from Yiddish and other languages that Israelis would have spoken before learning Hebrew. Also, assuming we are comparing Hebrew to MSA, MSA is intentionally conservative, being quite close to the classical Arabic of the Quran. Again, I'm aware it is not the same but it is a lot closer than the dialects are to the Arabic of the Quran.

It kinda seems that the different Arabic "dialects" are like the entire Slavic language family. They are mutually understandable to some extent but many things are very different and not the same. And MSA would be as if everyone still used Old Church Slavonic

Technically, fusha existed way before islam, it was the language of pre-islamic arabia as well. And it was even more complex. Quran is actually grammatically incorrect and has misspellings because it was written by common uneducated people. But since it's a religious book people deny or even hide that and try to force it on others. Fusha is now just a status thing at this point and lots of people make it their personality or identity. In other words it has been politicized to an extent. So that's why it's stressed, it's a propaganda kind of thing you could say. It's a complicated matter tbh that could only be understood when one is part of the culture. I say learning a dialect is useful and better, but you still need msa as a bases. Also, Saudi arabia has way more dialects, hijaz dialect and the dialects of southern people are too different. Due to hijza people being immigrants mostly and people whose origin and mother languages aren't arabic (some are turks, some are east asian, some are African and so on) and them mixing it up with arabic to make it easier for them to communicate amongst themselves and with each other, so it's softer and smoother than other saudi dialects. While southern dialects (which are usually tribal) are thicker and stronger and closer to fusha. Yet for some reasons they insist that the south is part of hijaz even though the people there are natives and indigenous 🗿 (except one tribe that bred with turks)

Omg, I’m trying to get an Arabic certificate at Pitt!!

How does the relative difference among Arabic dialects compare with the relative difference among Romance languages?

Your videos are great but could you please talk a hit more paused and slower

Imagine having this distinction (between formal and informal speech) in a langauge with the grammar of Polsih. Yeah... speaking Czech is just something different

The perfect of سمع has a kasra, not fat7a: sami3tum.

MSA, the standard language of Islam: I highly encourage you to learn me, the holy language of the Qur’an The world’s largest Islamic country (in Indonesian): mmmmm… *no*

This is definitely a foreigner's overview because much of what's said here is not relatable to native Arabic speakers: 1) It's not really a family of languages because Arabic speakers generally will understand each other from different dialects, yes it can be difficult sometimes with different vocabulary, but it's like a New Yorker and a Southerner communicating and not getting everything the other side says, but we still say both are speaking the same language, not the same "family of languages" in that case, don't we? 2) The "grammar" for dialects does not exist. This is only something taught to foreigners who don't learn MSA. The only grammar Arabic speakers learn is the MSA grammar and trust me that will dwarf whatever other language grammar you think is harder. The dialect "grammar" you referred to is just what people use every day without even thinking, so it looks easy because it isn't actually defined. The numbering system in MSA will drive you crazy on its own, and it's but a fraction of the difficulty Arabic grammar carries. 3) The diacriticals and cases are heavily emphasized when teaching elementary school children as an introduction to the language, after learning it, those become easy to infer from the text, although the literature is typically still written with them.

As someone who loves learning languages I understand the difficulty you feel to understand why people say it is a one language. I can surly tell you that arabs do not pretend that, yes maybe Arabic dialects are the most far dialects from each others when compared to other languages, but to us, we can understand each other pretty much; not because of social media today, even before people would understand each other easily, unlike the case with Romance languages that people cannot understand each other easily. Why? Because 1- arabic was perserved through the Quran; even today people are losing unique words that their grandparents used to use before and using MSA (fusha) vocabulary and conjugation unconsciously because it is fusha “the correct way” And 2- the root and pattern system, the root helps us know the meaning of a word that the other person uses, because we have the root in our mind, and the pattern helps us know in which way he forms the word - gender, number, tense, voice… etc- so it becomes pretty much easy. So compared to other languages we have a kind of a perk (root and pattern system) over other languages that makes us understand each other without difficulty. And above all of that Arabic is still mutual as Quran as I said helped us stay close unlike Romance languages that insanely broke away, the change between Arabic dialects isn’t big. 3- last thing is that like classical latin and vulgar latin the verbs (especially the auxiliary verbs) are similar to each other more than to MSA for example: 1-the verb “to go”: In MSA, it is ذهب “dhahab” But in all other dialects today, it is راح "rah” all the way from Yemen to Iraq to Morocco 2- “to see”: In MSA, it is رأى “ra’a” While in all other dialects from (as before from Yemen to Morocco) is شاف “shaf” So when you compare a word form a specific dialect you will see a big difference, but when you compare this specific dialect to other modern dialects you will see how more related they are to each other than to MSA. I’m not saying that because I am like one of those who pretends, no, I really feel you because I tried to learn many languages and had the same difficulty even though I’m not as knowledgeable as you but from a native Arabic speaker perspective, when I see you facing the difficulty I immediately remember myself talking to other native speakers of other languages and getting frustrated over things that they will tell me from their language that seem completely ridiculous to me. Maybe this is why there is a distinction between “C2” level and “native” level something that languages decreed on us to make languages the spirits of people that they only can understand and grasp :)

Toki Pona is easy.

oh how I hate those red letters on green background... it just hurts my eyes and takes several seconds to read since all I see at first is just this strong psychedelic contrast between ... the ... well ... it's probably letters. maybe you see a strong color contrast there but I have to stop the video, consciously suppress the eerie psychedelic and distortive aura and then decipher the letters which are of too similar color to the background, yet somehow strangely strongly different, and it takes serious concentration on my side to read it. I'm somewhat colorblind (deuteranomalic if you want to test what I see on some website, however those sites don't simulate the strange otherworldly aura perception that I have there). anyway, great video. one of those I don't have to play on higher speed.

I read somewhere that there's a move to make a new international standard based on the educated speech of Cairo. Does anyone here know more about that?

It really annoys me when other Muslims act as if Classical Arabic is the only ‘pure’ one. We have MSA just so we can keep the Quran in its original form, I don’t know why we act like it’s somehow superior.

Are they as different as the romance languages between each other?

This is kinda my problem with arabic. I'd love to learn moroccan or levantine arabic for travel/historical reasons, but it'd be like studying latin to prepare for my trip to Mexico. The situation honestly seems pretty analogous to that of the romance languages a thousand years ago, each having a regional variation of the standard language that no one speaks anymore natively, that lost its case system almost entirely, and that's used for mostly religious and political reasons.

That's what you get when you refuse to standardize your dialects which have become languages of their own since 1300 years.

صارلي تقريباً سنة ونص ادرس اللهجة الخليجية وان شاء الله رح اتخرج بكانون الثاني الجاي. بنسبة اللي خبرتي خلال دراستي استمتعت هواية وگدرت اتعلم الثقافة والتقاليد العربية من اساتذة عراقية ملهمة. اعتبر نفسي محظوظ.

Do Hindi and or Indonesian next!

What flag was that that you used for Spanish in the Italian Spanish split?

1000th like :)

Je me demandais si je devais apprendre le russe ou l'arabe comme prochaine langue...je commence à avoir ma réponse ;)

Idk if I should quit learning Arabic or not 😭😭

6:43 I don't think this has anything do with any missing part, even if you tried to write in MSA/classical the way you did it feels very. You need to rephrase the whole thing rather than thinking in English and translating every word. I am not sure about the exact context of the "intended meaning" but I feel like you should replace hear you by ~ see you (أراكم شايفكم ). Then the sentence you used sounds incomplete in arabic without an object. Lastly I am not sure if the verb you want for "ask" is سأل or تساءل. Did you mean شايفكم عم تسألوا / شايفكم بتسألوا / شايفكم عم تتساءلوا ? Btw تساءل is more like to ask oneself / to wonder

I am actually learning Russian right now, so I’m a bit worried about that grammatical warning lol

We need the New MSArabic based on real arabic.

Why is this speeded up ?

Im 100% arabic -Lebanese and i still cant speak arabic so dont feel bad lol i can understand it very well but i need to learn to speak it

Mmm well, El fus'ha is difficult but not hard for me as native speaker. If you want to improve your level watch Egyptian old movies and read Arabic literature I recommend Mahmood el-Aqaad's stories, Naguib Mahfouz'stories and Mostafa el-Manfalouti's stories. Those are a significant writers. Try to learn Egyptian accent because it's the easiest , but don't try to learn Port-Said people and upper Egypt people 'a dialect because they will be strange and hard to imitate for beginners, ok. Good luck in the learning of Arabic 👍

30 seconds in and you confuse "Yalla" (يلا) with "Ya Allah" (يا الله) in the video. And I knew this was gonna be a treat. Some random points: In Saudi, technically there are 5 dialects. You forgot the Southern dialect that could be considered as parts of Hejazi but they do stand on their own. Enough that Southern Saudis brag that other Saudi wouldnt understand it. A bit far stretched but you get the point. And there is the "Common" dialect of Saudi. Not official by any means but is somewhat recognized. So if someone from the South were to converse with someone from East, both would use the "Common" dialect to communicate. Cases are not NOT being used at all. They do exist in the Quran and The Bible and Schools to teach you Arabic. They are not being used in dialects because dialects utilize actual letters sometimes similar to English (A,I,E,O,U). But in MSA they are everywhere. Also because over time you will know what does the word mean because you have read the sentence or the position of the word in a sentence enough times that you would have memorized it by heart. Which takes me to. The cases in Arabic is similar to Hebrew. Open the Torah or Talmud and the Hebrew has cases to distinguish the enunciation of "Aleph" with another. A native Hebrew speaker won't use those cases in day to day similar to how a native Arabic speaker won't use cases in their day to day as well. I never heard of this "spoken but not written" rule. The only time I did was when I was studying German. Politicians resort to Grammaritians to correct their cases is because on average they are not good at reading in general. So giving a speech in Arabic without cases will expose them for the uneducated they are. You know who is actually can deliver an eloquent Arabic despite the distress? News reporters. Because of their time having to read and write and correct the language that over time they develop such mastery that they can just speak MSA while getting shot at and not make one mistake.

I'm glad I'm not learning Arabic. I mean, it's hard enough to speak German, and I say that as someone who grew up listening to German, due to my mother and grandmother speaking it, although neither of them are German, their ancestors were, as they both had very German names. Now as I never use German, or any other language except for English, even keeping in touch with my mother tongue is hard, as I hardly use it at work either. And this comes from someone who is supposed to be able to speak 5 languages.

"Arabic" and "Chinese" have something in common.

your channel name is absolutely genius

looks like this video is only getting views 4 months late haha but hey, at least hebrew helped you with the pronunciations, right?

4:21 _"in Christianity, you generally pray in the local vernacular"_ - this only became true with the emergence of Protestant Christianity in the 16th century, before that the prayers were said in Latin by the local priest, or in the Greek Orthodoxy: in Greek or in Old Church Slavonic. Besides الفصحى is one of the ugliest words I've heard.

Polish is really so hard? Isn't other slavic languages on same level of difficulty? Although, I'm Ukrainian, so other slavic languages for me is not so difficult, as for non-slavic people.

Mmmm,,, (يلا) doesn't equal (يا الله)

Not enough credit as to how much knowing Hebrew helps with Arabic. Huge. Lexical overlap ain’t nearly as important as grammatical concepts

Muslims don't believe that Classical Arabic is “the language of Allah” or “the only pure language” or more “correct”; Prophets communicate in the language of their people (including the scriptures they come with). Classical Arabic is preserved to avoid losing the message, as happened with the prior prophets. There is a belief that the Arabs were at their peak of eloquence at the time of the Prophet, which is why one of the miracles of the Qur'an is its challenging the poets with supernatural eloquence, similar to how witchcraft was at its peak in Egypt during Moses, which is why he challenged the magicians. Translations of the Qur'an are not considered holy because translations between _any_ two languages will lose meaning _and_ force you to specify what's not specified in the original; this has nothing to do with Classical Arabic being more “correct” or “pure” (though Muslims believe Allah chose to reveal the Qur'an in Arabic not arbitrarily but for reasons, some of which the Qur'an itself explicitly mentions). As an aside, descriptivism is not 100% true. Yes, it's a good operating principle when all you want to do is describe a language by how it's used, but that's not the end all be all of what we want to do with language. First of all, it doesn't rid us of an idea of correct and incorrect language, it just democratises it. Sure, if two large camps form, then both forms are self-consistent - in the sense that we know what the exceptions are, not in the sense that there aren't exceptions to the rules - and self-sustaining and useful within the camps and it'd be correct to use either that all participants of a conversation can understand and we probably shouldn't give one more or less prestige because of the social class of their speakers, but you can't just speak however you like without limit, otherwise language is useless. Second of all, it's a poor way to actually use language; like, seriously, please don't use “literally” to mean “very”. If I speak to someone regularly, and I know that when they use the word, “literally”, they mean it in the archaic sense, I would argue that person is using language in a much more useful (to their audience) way than someone else whose words can't be relied on. Self-imposing rules that may not be strictly part of a language is not necessarily a bad thing.

You need to learn الاعراب😂😂now

Still trying to make "yall" a thing in standard English I see.

thank you for the vid but arabic being the only pure language and the language of god isn't an islamic belief, allah spoke arabic but there no evidence that he only spoke arabic, but it is important to get islamic knowledge

So... It's basically like being able to study 'Romance' as a language, where everything that is written is in classical Latin but the people who speak the language do speak Italian, Spanish, Portugese or any other romance language and those languages usually don't have a written form? That's tough.

Well, Modern Hebrew is more of a conlang that borrowed from ancient Hebrew and Arabic, than a natural language that descended from ancient Hebrew.

Arabic is one language, I only ever learned Levantine Arabic and a bit of MSA and I can communicate with all other dialects almost seamlessly. In the Middle East kids from different regions speaking all sorts of different dialects go to school together and communicate in their own dialects perfectly. Same deal with offices. No offence but I think you’re just at too beginner of a level to have given an accurate opinion on the dialect continuum constituting one language or a language family. Equating Arabic dialects to say the Romance language would be incorrect as the degree of mutual intelligibility makes it ridiculous. At times they’d maybe miss a local expression or phrase and ask them to clarify but that could happen with different dialects of English very easily. The ones that you’d likely struggle with are Maghrebi (Morocco, Algeria, Tunis).

As an Arabic speaker I laugh at you as you forgot that Saudi arabia doesn't only have 3 accents, like boy there is Qasim accent in the Qasim region of burydah and jezaani accent in the region of jezaan, Also about sudan...you fucked it up bro , sudan has more than 100+ ethnic groups all having their own accents , yeah sure there is the Sudanese united accident but when you focus...we Sudanese people even have accents depending on region sometimes , and some ethnic groups can't pronounce xyz letters so sometimes they drop the ذ, (Note: well modern standard arabic isn't close to the quran but more close to the hadiths aka speeches of prophet Muhammad peace be upon him ,)

8:18 no one of the main reasons is Yiddish and company which have nothing to do with the old hebrew. The current hebrew is not the old one nor a natural continuity of it. It is an artificial "revival".

حريف isnt even correct in most dialects lollllll

coming back to this video, i feel like its kinda dramatic and inaccurate LOL! well not inaccurate for everyone but inaccurate for me, at least

I’ve heard many Arabic speakers use Arabic sounds in words like Qatar, Quran, etc when speaking English which I always find annoying (not just with Arabic but also other languages). What’s the reason they (and, I must say, disappointingly, you) do it. If you’re speaking English, reverting to foreign phonology sounds unnatural and makes my brain focus on those sounds rather than the message

Seems like learning hebrew first has messed up your Arabic pronunciation, you are pronouncing ح and خ the same even though they are two different letters that are never pronounced as each other

It isn't, it's just bad hebrew, easy to learn...

The way you speak English is very odd.

I think it is difficult because it is a useless language. There is no meaningful cultural output or intellectual discourse in the language, so you get bored quickly and stop practicing. Also it is possibly the most ugly language in the world, so that is also a major obstacle.