My native language is Arabic & sometimes about this language, on my dBuzz account 
Yesterday I was asked by 
Let's start with this, the difficulty of learning any language depends on many factors one of them is how similar it is to the languages you already know... For example, Arabic uses a completely different grammar structure than English, but I always notice how similar we use our vocabulary in practice.
Second can mean a "tiny period of time," and can also mean "After the first in value." The Arabic word for Second: "ثانية" has both meanings. There are many cases where I'm surprised to see English or Arabic being similar.
For someone who's has Arabic as the first language & English as the second one: I can say that if you're new to both Languages English is easier! Especially if your native language has Latin/Germanic origins.
Take in mind that despite being harder to learn, Arabic Language is a lot easier than it appears to be.
We only have 28 letters, and while every one of them has multiple ways to write/read, all of them follow the same rules. After you learn three letters, the other ones become much easier.
There are many rules on how to read Arabic words but all of these rules are logical to each other and there are barely any exception in the whole language to these rules. (English has many exceptions to its rules.)
By the way, this is a video I found online a few months ago. If you're interested in learning Arabic you must watch it! It explains more than what I'm doing in this article:
Another thing I should mention is that when we write, we normally omit diacritics (including short vowels) from writing because they take too much time and readers can be implicitly know them from the script itself. But since the wrong reading could change the meaning entirely, important & religious text (Like Qur'an) is written using full diacritics.
If I have to describe those in an analogy: It's like the Japanese Furigana. If it's a new word to you, it helps you read it, but it's mostly a distraction if you already know how to read that specific word. In Libya, we study Arabic Language written with full diacritics in Elementary School, but don't do that from Middle School and up.
For example, the Islamic greeting "السلام عليكم" which means "Peace Upon You" would be written as "السّلَامُ عَلَيكُمْ" if you add short vowels, but we don't do that because the readers are expected from the context to know what it means and how it should be read.
To compare it to English, we're writing it as if we're writing: "pec upn yu." You probably won't understand it immediately, but if you're experienced chat messaging in early 2010s you'll know that your brain could get used to it fast.
Finally Arabic language is big and has a huge history, that you need less than %3 of it to be able to communicate with Arabs. (Each Arabic region has its own version of the language but most of them can speak Modern Standard Arabic so you should learn that.)
I don't think anyone alive right now is a master of the language, and even Native Arabs learn something new every day. (I know I am.) It's a huge field with many institutes specializing in it.
So that's what I wanted to say about Arabic... These are just thoughts of a Native Arabic who knows how to speak English and loves to compare the two languages from time to time.
