Arabic اللغة العربية

If you ever thought learning Klingon would be cool, but then suddenly realized only dorks want to learn Klingon, Arabic may be for you. I started learning Arabic in 1997, and let me tell you it's a tough nut to crack. Arabic is spoken in about 20 countries and has just as many if not more dialects. Some dialects like the Gulf dialect are somewhat close to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which is used in official communication, TV News, taught in school etc., whereas other dialects such as Moroccan or مغربي is so different that native speakers of one country will have a very difficult time understanding them. It's like billy bob from Mudlick, Kentucky trying to listen to somebody from the highlands of Scotland, only worse. A problem I ran into with dialects when I was learning, was that the teachers of various Arabic speaking countries weren't used to speaking proper MSA and would therefore often slip into English because it felt more comfortable to them. Nevertheless, Arabic is a very important language to learn these days, especially if you want to work in the oil industry or for DoD, State Department and so forth. If you are going to go with a dialect start with Egyptian first. It is the most widely spoken.

My motivation:
Initially my motivation was a woman I had met. I was a waiter and she was one of the scientists I was waiting on. Whether it was my quirky behavior or my devilishly good looks I am not sure, but she took an instant liking to me. I ended up enlisting in the Navy to be a linguist, and was probably the only person to walk into the recruiters office and proclaim, "I want to learn Arabic." Nobody else really wanted Arabic, they wanted Japanese or German. What they got, once arriving at the language school in Monterey, CA, was Korean, Arabic or Russian. For those who flunked out of Arabic they were given what was referred to as Arabic-lite aka Persian/Farsi. After graduating from the language school, I went on to learn intelligence application in Texas, and from there went on to work for a DoD customer. When my enlistment was up, I was stop-lossed as were many others due to the horrific events of 9/11 (and no, none of us whined like the dude who was responsible for the Hollywood flop of the same name "Stop-loss"). Despite the numerous times I cursed the language and the camel it rode in on, I am glad I learned it.

Pros:
- A lot of teaching materials have come out in the past ten years for English speakers.
- Speaking any amount of Arabic will delight a native speaker, who will be pleased you took the time to learn some. By the way, in my experience if you are light skinned they may assume you are from Lebanon or Jordan.
- Learning Arabic will help you in learning Aramaic and Hebrew, both of which are based off of the three letter root system; words derived from three root letters such as K-T-B, i.e. to write or he wrote.
- Grammar is relatively easy, especially for those speaking عامية; everyday dialects. They have one word for the, ال and word order is similar to English i.e. subject-verb-object.

Cons:
- Extremely hard for people, who are used to studying Indo-European languages.
- The dialects really make it tough.
- Most dictionaries make you look up words by the root instead of alphabetically. This can be tricky at first.
- Finding Arabic rock music is almost non-existent, as well as good-quality movies in MSA.
- Plurals can be very tricky, as you don't just add an "s" or "en" at the end.
- Even the best English to Arabic dictionaries seem to really suck.
- Subtle differences between hard H and soft h, hard S and soft s, hard T and soft t etc. can get annoying after awhile.

Tips:
- Unless you are super motivated, take a class first. I have yet to meet anybody who learned Arabic on their own.
- Use the word ya"ni يعني a lot when needing to grasp for a word; similar to also in German.
- Most Arabic bookstores have English language classic that are in English on one page and Arabic on the other; dual-language books. This is a big help, although the quality of the book isn't always stellar.

If you are just starting out I suggest: