ABSTRACT
Until now, most communication between the Arab and the Western world has been established by means of Arab translators. Western languages are translated into Arabic by Arab translators and the Arabic language is most often translated by them as well. How is it that so few Westerners are able to become mediators between the Arab world and the West by means of the language of the Arabs themselves? The problem is that for Westerners, the Arabic language is, indeed, a distant language. The learnability of a language depends on the distance between the learner's language and the language he or she wants to learn. When people learn a familiar language, many elements of the new language are easily assimilated. When we learn an unfamiliar language, the study becomes more difficult because of new grammatical structures and a completely different vocabulary. On the other hand, the big problem of false friends (also “false cognates” or faux amis) 1 , which occurs when learning a familiar language, becomes much more likely.
