Well, there is no “p” in Arabic, so it makes sense that native Arab speakers would struggle with it initially. The same applies to “v”.

As a native speaker of both Arabic and English, I have no trouble with pronouncing letters in either language.

Can you figure out which dialect the original author is learning here? From some of the vocabulary I'm pretty sure it isn't the Damascene Arabic I learned.

It’s formal Arabic, i.e., Modern Standard Arabic (MSA).

This is a neutral and more grammatically correct version of the language. Its use is mostly limited to the written medium, but is also used for verbal communication in news channels and academic contexts.

Calling FuSha (Modern Standard Arabic) a

>neutral and more grammatically correct version of the language

is nuts. Arabic isn’t a language any more than the Romance languages are. Moroccan, Egyptian and Yemeni Arabic are at least as divergent as Spanish, French and Romanian. FuSha is like if the entire Romance speaking world wrote in Latin.

The academic contexts FuSha is used in are also limited to primary and secondary instruction, Arabic language and religion mostly. Tertiary education across the Arab world is often conducted in English or French so the educated classes will speak at least one of those languages at a near native level. That’s part of why there are fewer books translated into Arabic each year than into Dutch.

The local variants are actually older than standard Arabic (they all seem to stem from a common source). The standard Arabic is a synthetic language invented by grammarians who selected what they considered the best of all Arabic dialects at their time and formalized it. The general wisdom that the local variants are deformed form of the standard Arabic is not supported by linguistic research.

True, the differences are significant, to say the least...

It’s more an inability to grasp it rather than an inability to produce that sound.

It’s especially apparent when after learning to make the “p” sound, ESL (or ETL/EFL even!) Arabs go around saying “apsoloutely no broblem.” The most common reverse substitution is probably “peautiful” with considerable emphasis on the p.

The mechanics of speech is complicated and most of the people most of the time have no idea what is actually going on, pretty much like with breathing.

It doesn't help that alphabetical writing systems are sold to us from young age as if they were actual representing the sounds. They are not, and in more subtle ways than you'd think.

For example, in the context of B's and P's, English has "explosive consonants". In many words the "p" sound is actually followed by a puff of air. But this also happens incidentally when B is followed by some other sounds. Imagine pronouncing "beautiful" without emitting any puff of air after the B and you'll notice you sound Italian or Indian.

So, if your native language doesn't have the p sound at all and you learn it from examples in English it's quite likely you'll latch on the "puff of air" feature of exaggerated explosive variant of the p sound you might be practicing a lot.

You'll then hear a similar sound in beautiful, and try to repeat that too but native speakers might percieve that as a p sound

That's an interesting explanation, thank you.

the statement still stands.

Our bodies are made to pronounce a ton of sounds we both can't hear and speak as adults.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/accents-are-fo...

The expert quoted in that article disagrees with the idea that you can't do it:

"People talk about a 'window of opportunity' for learning language," Kuhl says. "The implication is that if you miss that opportunity, it's too late. I don't agree. It is more difficult with the years. But not impossible."

Personally, I think the largest difficulty is the amount of practice required. Kids can babble about all day, but as an adult, even investing an hour a day into language practice is hard to find the time for.