Interesting. I’ve never approached it like that. Arabic and Hebrew are related. You could benefit by learning both, and use them to build off of each other.
Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese are all “Romance” languages, I believe. That’s why Italian sounds so similar to Spanish, and Portuguese is like French and Spanish mixed together.
Brazil has the largest “ Black” population out of any country outside of Africa. I would like to know a little Portuguese, but I don’t want to have too much on my plate. If I try to study a variety of different languages at once, I’ll just confuse myself. That’s kind of how my brain works.
Maybe I can try Hebrew one week, and Arabic the next. Alternate them and use their similarities to my advantage. But like you said, they both have different alphabets and writing styles. The shyt is actually intimidating.
Yay! Glad i had something to add.
Re: Hebrew vs Arabic, afaik, those two AND amharic descend from akkadian. (Akkadian speakers took over the near east, what you might know as sumeria, after the actual sumerians.)
In linguistics, i was taught to draw language trees. That's how you decipher unknown ancient languages, you find their cousins and back-translate. They gave us pop quizzes where we had to decipher some unknown native American language (chosen bc
they knew that
we knew the romance languages). It was fun.
Anyway, that's the tree. In theory, they should be as similar as french, Spanish, and Italian, but... they're not really.
The reason is, TIME. French, Italian, and Spanish have had, let's say, 2000 yrs to break off from their latin roots. The semitic languages have had at least double that time. But! Still, if you sound the words out, despite the different alphabets, they MAY be mutually intelligible to the astute. Like how i can read Italian from just knowing Latin, 2000 yrs apart.
The key, i think, is to learn all the alphabets and their sounds. Then, once you know one vocab word, you
kinda, loosely know them all, bc they
sound similar even if they don't
look similar. Vocab on semi lock, you move to grammar. Ancient languages are generally more... combobulated than their modern variations, unwieldy linguistically vs modern languages which are developed low key as an
improvement on the old. It's helpful to understand a little about the old grammar, bc, just as an example from French, adjectives sometimes follow OR precede nouns. That's a clunky holdover from Latin. (In English, a more 'modern',
trading language, our adjectives tend to precede the noun.)
So, if you know the old, you can easily 'keep track' of modern improvements and sort them out between the grandchildren of ther language you know.
That's just my way, tho.
I like to take things in order and it seems more time efficient to learn the 'parent' first and then learn how the 'grand- children'
differ. Ofc, my knowledge is of younger parents
, but we'll see.
What resources are you using to learn Hebrew?
Fellow polyglot. French, latin, classical Greek, enough Spanish to make due. #uptown
of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the very first foreign language i dabbled in- ages 4-8, so early i barely remember but it all comes back). 
I salute you, OG.
