Arabic vs Turkish vs Persian: which is the hardest?

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00:00 Intro
01:47 Language origin
03:38 Writing system
05:13 Pronunciation
07:40 Vocabulary
11:29 Grammar
16:20 Difficult level

If you want to learn Arabic, you can check out this video :

If you want to learn Persian, you can check out this video :

[zoe.languages]

Dear friends, here is our last video of the year! 😇I hope you enjoy it! I want to take this moment to say thank you! 😘Your support, engagement, and encouragement have been the pillars of this channel. It's been a year filled with learning, growth, and shared experiences that have brought us closer.🎉✨💖 I wish you all a wonderful New Year filled with joy, health, and prosperity. May all your hard work bear fruit and lead to wonderful outcomes. Cheers to a New Year! 🌟

[valerieayla]

There is an old saying that dates back to Ottoman times that goes like this: Persian starts easy and becomes difficult, while Turkish starts difficult and becomes easy, and Arabic starts difficult and stays difficult!

[gaborbakonyi]

I am Hungarian, and the Turkish language is very easy for us, due to the similarities in the vocabulary and in the Grammar too. Despite of the fact, that officially the Turkish and the Hungarian are members of different language families, they are factually a little bit similar. In the Hungarian the word order is more flexible than in the Turkish, due to the mandatory suffix for the objects. The Hungarian is also agglutinative language with also two level vowel harmony, and some hundred Turkic words are in the Hungarian vocabulary. In contrast to the Turkish, the Hungarian has both short, both long vowels. Due to the Hungarians had left Central Asia before the spreading of the Islam, the Hungarian language has a very strong Turkic influence, a slight Persian influence but no Arabic influence. All of the Turkish sounds are exists in the Hungarian except the soft "Ğ" and dotless "I". Only some traces of the dotless-I exists. As far as I know both the Persian, both the Turkish, both the Hungarian has the Turkish "ç", "p", "j" sounds, but they are missing from the Arabic. The Turks were using the Arabic letters modified by the Persians to write these consonant sounds, on the other hand the case of the Turkish vowels remained unresolved. When I was learning the Turkish language, I learned a little bit about the Arabic letters too.
Due to the Hungarians were in contact with the Turks in the far past, for example some words of the Gök-Türk language are present in the Hungarian, but missing from the present day Turkish.

[massi.erfani]

کاش اون عده که میگفتن زبان فارسی از عربی اومده این ویدیو رو نگاه میکردند تا ببینند کاملاً برعکس میگفتن. ممنونم از شما استاد زبان شناسی🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

[SeldenDeemer]

I have studied Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. Turkish is weird, but very regular. Persian is an Indo-European language, which helps, but it remains more difficult due to the script. Arabic is absolutely the most difficult language I have ever studied. Many years ago I asked an elderly Arabist how long it took to master Arabic. He replied "40 years is a good start."

[samsong]

Turkish is like mathematics. It is a very flexible language. In Turkey, if you say a word you want to say in a close voice, many people will understand it. There is subject, verb, tense, etc. all in one word. You can make a name a root word and produce many meanings. Although this makes it difficult for people to learn Turkish, even if you say a word incorrectly, as I mentioned above, Turks can understand it. Sometimes you can explain it with facial expressions and movements without speaking at all.

I have traveled to many countries. Almost all of them have difficulty understanding due to mispronunciation of a word.
For example:

You can understand the word "Geliyorum" by saying "Galiyom" or "Celiyorim".

But in London, I repeated the word "twenty" three times, even though I said "tveni", which is their local people pronunciation. The man understood when I said "Twenti"
It's the same in Arabic. Misreading a letter gives a different meaning.

[MEME-Sulei]

I'm an Arabia but my favorite language is Persian فارسي
Love from Jordan ❤️

[khaldoonmk]

As an Iraqi Arab from the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and as a person who masters the three mentioned languages as well as Kurdish: I would like to tell you that I loved your video so much. You pronounced the three of them quite perfectly, especially Arabic which I know, really hard to pronounce. In Iraq the three languages are practiced although each of them is related to a different family of languages: Arabic is Semitic, Farsi is Indo-Eurpean and Türkçe is Ural-Altai turkic member. Frankly speaking the three languages are totally different BUT Islamic belief gathered them in my country Iraq. I'm proud to be an Arab. I adore Arabic and other brother Semitic languages as Assyrian, Chaldean, Syriac, Mandaian, Aramaic, Hebrew and Amhari . My advice to the the three nations Arabs, Persians and Turks is to study each others' languages because they, for sure, will open the gates of other languages to them. I wished if Farsi was written in Latin rather than Turkish because Farsi is deeply close to Latin Languages or West European languages as Italian and French. Eastern European languages are agglutinative languages and hard to study for having many many cases (Check Finnish to belive what I'm talking about «nominative, accusative, genitive, partitive, inessive, elative, illative, adessive, ablative, allative, essive, translative, abessive, comitative and instructive.»). I'm really astonished for those who care about nothing in their lives but for pretending that they are different fron Arabs, don't they have any other job in their lives except (Hating Arabs)? May Allah help them to pass this complex. Yes, Turkish and Farsi are full of Arabic vocabulary, where is the problem, O deniers, for Gods sake? You don't feel ashamed for adding French and English words to your languages, although, they are thousands of miles away from your countries? We've got many words from Farsi and Turkish but those words didn't make us ashamed because we added them as part of Arabic vocabulary on the countrary we feel proud because this means that we have fruitful reactions with our neighbors. But we feel ashamed walHaduliLah if we use English or French words. The Arab dignity refuses to have words from colinisers languages. خيلي متشكرم وبسيار سپاس گذارم. Çok teşekkur ederim. ❤❤❤. By the way Arabic is the language number 5 of the UN because of the high numbers of users.

[Sediq-Saleh]

Farsi is a very sweet and easy language It is very easy to learn and speak with the simple verb rules, but it is a bit difficult to read poetry and understand its meaning, and whoever learns Persian learns the language of poetry and mysticism, which is a human heart. Human beings are members of each other, because they are one gem in creation

[AlexBurtonMusic]

In the Turkish language, the word "ilim" is associated with the religion of Islam. It means Islamic knowledge. We use the word "bilim" for science. It is a word derived from the Turkic verb "to know", "bil-". It has no connection with Arabic, it is coincidentally similar.

[Whispers-]

Regardless of the media attacks, our trip to Iran was the best and most interesting trip of our life. Iran was a safe, beautiful country with a rich culture and kind people with wonderful tourist attractions. Iran is a place that has no equivalent anywhere in the world. On our part, I am grateful to the dear people of Iran.

[karen]

In Persian Language, the word (علم( is associated with the religion of islam! But We Use the word )دانش( for science.

[brandmanager]

Persian influence in Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, and Sanskrit staggering. There are thousands of direct Persian words in Bengali.

[thraciensis]

There are hundreds of thousands of local Turkish people and speakers in Cyprus, Bulgaria, Greece, Moldova, Macedonia, Romania, Kosovo, Ukraine all the way to Bosnia. Plus the Crimean Tatar standard and southern dialect in Crimea are intelligible with Turkish of Turkiye. Azerbaijani Turkish dialect is also intelligible. Millions of Azerbaijani Turks and Turks of Turkiye are communicating and conversing in their own dialects in the world wide web continuously. This does not include the thousands of Turkish learners from all around the world with the soft power of Turkiye through movie and music industry and millions of big Turkish speaking diaspora in other countries.

[useruser]

Hats off, for your knowledge and quality of video.
Im Persian and I'm happy after seeing this.

[melek]

As a Turkish speaker, I've tried learning Arabic but it was literally impossible for me starting from the alphabeth. I remember my head was exploding first day during the lesson :))) I know Japanese and Korean so Im usually good with learning other alphabets but writing Arabic and then combining words and reading them was honestly IMPOSSIBLE. I really didnt think that it could be that difficult for a Turkish speaker.

Also it's true that there are loads of words in Turkish that comes from Arabic roots but most of them (not all) are used in old Turkish. We still know and rarely use them because of elders or literature. Words such as ilim or sefer can be found only in books or maybe our grandparents might use them.

Amazing video. Made me think that rather than Arabic Persian might be my way :)) THank you <3

[mustafabaris]

Greetings from Ankara, Turkey 😊 Turkish language belongs to a family called Turkic Languages, this is also referred to as a group Turkic People in which Turkish people make up one third of this group. There are mainly 6 branches of the Turkic Languages. Oghuz, Karluk, Kipchak, Yakut, Oghur and Arghu . The language we speak in Turkey belongs to the Oghuz branch. Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan also speak Azerbaijani and Turkmen that belong to the same group, this is why Turks when they travel to these countries, we are able to communicate 85 % of the time without any problems.. Communication gets more challenging once Turkish people travel to Uzbekistan ( They speak Uzbek that belongs to the Karluk branch ) and to Kazakhstan and Kirghizistan ( They speak Kazak and Kirgizi that belong to the Kipchak branch ) . There is also the Yakut branch where the people in Siberia and Mongolia along with the Uyghur people in Xin Jiang province in China use to speak their languages. I have been to Xin Jiang province in China to visit . I was in Urumqi and Turfan for 20 days total and I could communicate with the people 25 % of the time.. Then there is the Orghu branch where a very tiny group of Christian people in Russia use to speak. These are the Chuwash people, make up around 1.5 million of the 200 millionTurkic People . The last is the least spoken branch which is the Arghu branch , there are about 20 thousand people living in Iran that belong to this Turkic group and they speak Khalaj, which is very similar to Turkish . I have been to Iran but I have not visited this region yet. I will definitely go visit on my next trip : )

I think that languages are fascinating no matter what country you come from.. I had the great chance to live in China for 14 years, I lived in Shenzhen, China in the south, I learnt Chinese and it is somewhat easier for Turkish people to learn Chinese than European and American people..Not sure why this is, maybe perhaps, we are a little smarter than them : )

Cheers to you all from Ankara, Turkey ! ☺☺

[amym.]

Speaking Arabic is powerful ❤ Turkish is kind of romantic ❤ and Farsi is combination of both ❤ love ‘em all 🥰

[senshencritical]

Thanks for the video Zoe, by your leave I want to add a detail: There are some sounds/letters in pronunciation (which formal/political Turkish doesn't have but people use in daily language) in Turkish accents. As a native Turkish speaker who currently lives in "İç Anadolu" (meaning "Inner Anatolia", the geographical region that involves many speaking differences in daily language) I can example that I frequently hear "ñ" or "ḫ" sound ("ñ" is a semi-guttural sound/letter between N and G letters, and you already know about "ḫ", "kh"). They can be heard hereabout within sentences like "Ne arıyo'ñuz?" (meaning "What do you look for?")

Additionally, dear and esteemed Zoe, Kemal Atatürk didn't determine to "westernize" Turkey by choosing Latin alphabet, he tried to modernize as you mentioned in the video of course but basically he aimed to choose an alphabet that adapts the Turkish grammar more than Arabic alphabet and raise the ratio of literacy (because in those years, before the reform of alphabet, literacy ratio was less than 7% in countryside and %30 in urban.) Peace and lots of love :)

[pjfoley]

So well done! Thank you. I have been a Turkish student for 40+ years but this was extremely helpful.