Foreign Languages
We offer comprehensive and exam-oriented week-day and weekend batches. The course concludes with a practice test package which is comprehensively designed to bring your band-score to the required level.
S M Academy offers best classroom coaching for Arabic language and our comprehensive designed courses takes you through basic concepts, exam strategies and practice sessions.
German
How many people speak German? What is the meaning of “Standard German”? How many words do we use in the German language? And what do “false friends” have to do with learning German? We will provide you with the answers to these and more questions.
The German language consists of about 5.3 million words – with a rising trend. About one-third of those words were added in the last 100 years. This means the German language contains eight times as many words as the English language. In the everyday conversation, we use much fewer words: only 12.000 – 16.000 words including about 3.500 foreign words. The “Dudeen”, a popular reference book for grammar and orthography of the German language, lists 135.000 words. Because of the possibility of creating words by joining single words together to make one word, the German language is considered as a particularly rich language.
Spanish
Spanish (Española, Castellanos) belongs to the Romance branch of the Indo-European language family. Like all Romance languages, Spanish developed from Vulgar Latin in an area of the Iberian Peninsula that is now Spain, and was brought to the Americas, the Philippines, and parts of Oceania by the Spanish colonization in the 16th century. It is spoken as a first language in 30 countries world-wide by about over 399 million and as a second language by some 89.5 million people.
Spanish vocabulary is Latin-based with a large number of borrowings from Arabic, and more recently from English. Spain’s Arabic connection goes back to the invasion of Spain by Arabic-speaking Moors in 711 AD. Spanish and Arabic coexisted side by side until the Moors were expelled in the 15th century AD. By then thousands of Arabic words had become part of Spanish. Many of them start with al-, the definite article in Arabic. Many Spanish place names can be traced to Arabic, e.g., Alhambra from Arabic al-hamrâ ‘the red (castle)’. You will recognize some of these words as they are very similar to English words.
French
La langue Francoise, the language of love, is the first or second language in more than 43 countries and is spoken by 125 million people around the world, on every continent. French is one of the official languages of Belgium, Switzerland, and Canada, and it is considered an unofficial second language of many countries such as Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. It is also one of the six main languages of the United Nations.
The contemporary pronunciation of the standard language was fixed in the 19th Century. French was established as an official language in the French and Belgian colonial possessions in Africa. While the vocabulary and style of Modern French have been influenced by movements such as romanticism and realism, structurally French has changed comparatively little since the Classic Modern period. Standardisation of the French language has been aided in modern times by more widespread education and the media.
Japanese
The Japanese language is spoken by approximately 120 million inhabitants of Japan, and by the Japanese living in Hawaii and on the North and South American mainland. It is also spoken as a second language by the Chinese and the Korean people who lived under Japanese occupation earlier this century.
Japanese sentences follow Subject-Object-Verb word order, which means the verb typically occurs at the end of the sentence. Subject pronouns may be omitted if they are understood from context. Japanese has only two verb tenses, past and present, and the number of irregular verbs in the language is small.
Unlike in many European languages, Japanese nouns lack both gender and number, and articles do not accompany nouns. Instead, noun functions are indicated through the use of particles. These particles serve such roles as marking sentence subjects and objects and expressing relationships between sentence components, much like prepositions do in English. Such particles are different from English prepositions, however, in that, they follow rather than precede the nouns they mark.
Arabic
Arabic is descended from a language known in the literature as Proto-Semitic. This relationship places Arabic firmly in the Afro-Asiatic group of world languages. Going further into the relationship between Arabic and the other Semitic languages, Modern Arabic is considered to be part of the Arabo-Canaanite sub-branch of the central group of the Western Semitic languages.
Being one of the quirkiest in the world, the actual script reads from right to left with an alphabet containing 28 consonants. There are various types of Arabic script, some more intricate than others. The best known are “Kufic” and “Thuluth”. The Arabic script has been used for decorative purposes all over the Muslim world in mosques, houses and other buildings. This is possible as the writing flows in a beautifully stylised fashion.
