Sep 05 2010
Reading Arabic harder than it looks: Israeli researchers
September 2, 2010 Xinhua, People’s Daily Online
A series of recent studies performed at the University of Haifa show that learning to read Arabic calligraphic script is much harder that learning English. The studies compared reading tests given in English, Arabic, and Hebrew, another right-to-left Semitic language also utilizing a system of diacritical symbols. Professor Zohar Eviatar and Dr. Raphiq Ibrahim believe the greater difficulty stems from the visual complexity of written Arabic.