Q: Is Maltese a good stepping-stone towards learning Arabic? A: Probably not, unless you were born and raised there

The Cathedral of St. Paul in the city of Mdina, in Malta. It is built on the site where governor Publius was reported to have met St. Paul the Apostle following his shipwreck off the Maltese coast.

In late September I had what turned out to be a fairly silly idea about using Maltese as a stepping-stone to learning Arabic for those that otherwise found the idea of learning Arabic straight out a bit scary. Maltese, for those that don't know, is a Semitic language spoken on the country of Malta, originally from Arabic but now a language in its own right, that uses the Latin alphabet and has a ton of Italian (well actually Sicilian) vocabulary along with other European languages. It's actually a bit like English compared to other Germanic languages in that way: basic vocabulary is still quite similar to Arabic (just in the same way that words like Hand and Wasser and Hus and the rest are similar to German), but as soon as you get away from that they're really quite different.

So what makes the idea silly? Well, here are two reasons:

• People on Malta speak English and Italian far too well to get much practice in unless you're really dedicated, and
  
• The language is spoken in too small an area for a student to retain it well after they leave the country, just like how I've had almost no luck whatsoever with finding people that speak Estonian outside of Estonia after I left.

If Maltese were spoken by tens of millions of people over a large area where English wasn't an official language, then maybe it would be a good idea.

That was actually made quite clear when I brought up the subject on a forum around the same time, but I was still quite curious about whether anybody from areas like Sicily ever learned to speak Maltese and then later went on to Arabic when they realized how much of it they could understand, and coincidentally today I stumbled upon a person on YouTube that mentioned that he was from Malta (and has a blog here by the way if you want to see what Maltese looks like) and was kind enough to answer some of the questions I had. Here are some parts from his response:

Well, to tell you the truth I've never been asked this precise question before and I haven't really noticed that it does come up. I have studied Arabic and knowing Maltese did help me a lot I must say, but Maltese is not a dialect of Arabic. It's a separate language. It's got a slightly different grammar. It's simpler at times, and completely different at others. The fact that we use Latin script can even make the Semitic structure of the language a bit opaque. I would in fact suggest the other way round. If one wants to learn Maltese, one should learn some Arabic first. Just like it makes more sense learning some Latin first before venturing into Italian than the other way round.

I've never met any Italian who studied Arabic either, and they hardly ever consider learning Maltese unless they plan on living here (like my neighbour). She only managed to start speaking it after living here for more than 10 years. I don't think it helps that most Maltese people are at least trilingual in Maltese, English and Italian and can switch languages quicker than a blink of an eye.

You also seem to be under the impression that vocab-wise Maltese will be easy. Well, most seem to claim that at least 50% of Maltese vocabulary comes from Italian. That may be true to a certain extent when it comes to entries in the dictionary. However, the vocabulary that is used in every day talk contains more Semitic and a touch of Anglo-Saxon. It's only the lawyers who use many Romance words in their every-day talk and you'd sound like one if you had to do the same. Most Romance vocabulary in Maltese also tends to come from Sicilian not standard Italian.

A bit on IALs and relative difficulty of languages:

I've heard of the notion that learning a constructed language like Interlingua or Esperanto can help greatly in the learning of a foreign language. I tried learning Esperanto once but I wasn't very persistent and I gave up after a few months. I liked the idea of it being a common language for all more than the advantages it gives one in learning a foreign language, but I guess that was a time when I was being utopian. I had already studied 4 languages by then anyway.

...

The main barrier for both Persian and Arabic is the script. Many think it's so hard, yet it's just a set of 28 characters (slightly more for Persian I believe) with slight alterations which one can learn in a few days. I did so in 3 days and all of a sudden I could decipher a good number of words due to their resemblance to Maltese. Arabic is at an even greater disadvantage for Westerners for not being an Indo-European language, but that's the real barrier not the script. The script is only superficial.

And finally on what the entries on the blog are about:

Most of the entries are simply poems but there is an entry where I speak of a particular event called Mnarja, which falls on the 29th of June. You can have a look at it in order to get an idea of what the Maltese language looks like.