I was thinking of getting a jumpstart on next year’s New Year’s resolution so I want to learn Arabic. I know absolutely zip about the language except for what I read while searching the SDMB for some advice. There was a thread called “What Brand of Arabic Should I Learn?” that’s pointed me to MSA or Egyptian or Shami dialects. I haven’t found any local classes yet so I’m thinking book/tape/video/computer program et al would be a good start. So I’m looking for advice, experience, opinions, complaints, praises, and on and on.
(And not to toot my horn, but…toot. I’ve had a good history of learning languages, I majored in German, took 5 years of French, 4 years of Spanish, a year of Japanese, a semester of Swedish, and studied Russian, Irish, and Cherokee independently. I’m feeling pretty confident that I should be able to pick it up, or at least the basics a bit easier than the person in the linked thread was saying. Then again, that all happened ten years ago, so who knows if my old brain can get another language in it.)
Shoot me your CV. I know a military base here that is hiring (almost) anyone to teach English.
On the other hand, it is one of the worse places in The Kingdom to work. A good place to start though.
I had fun with German as well. Dappled a bit with some success in Japanese. Arabic kicked my butt for the first 4 weeks of a 40 hr/week immersion course.
The hardest part was learning the letters. They have more, and the sounds they represent can be tricky for us Westerners. Also, they don’t have “block” letters like we do that look the same no matter where they appear in a word. Arabic letters change form slightly depending on whether they begin the word, end the word or appear in the middle–kind of like cursive writing. The trouble I had was that the letters simply would not “stick” in my memory. But with work and exposure that passed and it was not nearly as bad as Japanese Kanji which is a whole 'nother Oprah!
Second hardest part was making and hearing the new language sounds. There’s a reason why nobody seems to agree on how to spell that Libyan leader’s name–a good number of the Arabic letters have no intentional vocalized equivalent in English, so we don’t know which of our characters to use for them. This is particularly troublesome with Arabic D, S, T and TH (the) sounds.
Arabic grammer is a bit more complex (nouns, adjectives and verbs have to agree with gender, number and tense), but the rules are more strict than English and so they are not particularly problematic. As languages go it’s my favorite to play with because new vocabulary is often one of something like 12 forms of a simple 2 or 3 letter root–the “form” determines the meaning. So it’s pretty easy to guess the meaning of a new word if you know its root and the effect of the ‘form.’ We had some Arabic teachers who flatly denied the existence of any such root-based structure, but I think they were just trying to be difficult–it clearly exists and works far more often than not.
Ahh, considering a career move to a Federal agency, are we? 
Good Luck & Bonne Chance!
I was about to suggest searching for a cultural institution from an arabic country since that’s where I began learning arabic (and no…I still don’t speak it), but since you apparently can’t find arabic classes, I assume you don’t live in a city large enough for such an institution to exist.
If there’s some large mosque where you live, you could try there. Here at least some do offer arabic classes, and you don’t need to be muslim to attend them. You could also consider lessons, or at least practice with an arabic student, if there’s some university around. Preferably someone who has a good grasp of grammar.
Book/tapes/ etc… unfortunately aren’t enough. You need to practice the language, and have your mistakes corrected by a native speaker or a teacher, IMO.
I meant with an arab student, not with a student of arabic.
The metro area I live in is about 2.2 million people. I’ve found classes at the University but not really compatible with a 9-5 schedule unfortunately. I’ll check around campus and see if there are some study groups I could get involved with. (They’re going to be moving into Spring Semester and aren’t offering the first half of the beginner’s course. So, I could wait til next Fall to pick it up there if the schedule permits…)
And like I emailed Paul In Saudi, I’m just doing this for fun, maybe travel in the future to UAE, Egypt, or more and to get a better worldview of what’s going on over there. I think it also be pretty cool to read arabic websites/blogs/etc to get a different filtered account too. I’m a dork. 
Here’s a brief introduction based on my being a little interested and starting to learn. For anybody who actually knows how to speak or read Arabic, it should be good for laughs.
The alphabet is larger than the English alphabet, and the letters run together like cursive writing. It is written from right to left.
Consonants are way more important than vowels, which can sort of be ignored. When Arabic is written for most purposes, the vowels are omitted. Only Koranic writing includes vowels.
There are way more consonants that represent sounds from deep in the throat, sounds that simply cover English k and g and x and h. It’s supposed to be a challenge for English speakers to learn to make and distinguish these.
Arabic words are based on some root idea, and words related by meaning to the root idea are built from the root word plus extra syllables or changes in the consonants, usually toward the end of the word. In the book I studied, their first example was the root word for “murder”, and the related words were for things like “murderer” and “slaughterhouse” and “weapon” and “mortal wound”. This first example was mother’s milk for my subconscious apprehensions about Arabs and terrorism. I still don’t know if they picked the example out of prejudice, or Arabs talk about killing way more than the rest of us, or it was just a meaningless and unfortunate coincidence. I never did see how to ask “Where is the library?” like in high school Spanish class.
Arabic makes it hard to express some ideas that are common in Western thought. Most remarkably, we talk for example about the separation of Church and State. To begin with, Arabic doesn’t have distinct words for those things, which we think of as two different things. They have a word for something like
“authority”. And they can express that a thing favors religion or goes against religion. So when we describe a “separation of church and state”, they might translate that as “we have authorities that promote religion and authorities that try to tear down religion, and they are separate”. Not very nuanced.
I have read descriptions of inaccurate translations that sound like they would promote misunderstanding and friction. For example, sometimes when we hear translations of Arabic about “Israelis”, the word used in the original really means “Jews”. Or for example what we call “Taliban” is the English plural of “Talib” or (IIRC) “religious scholar”.
It’s hard for a Westerner to come by a more accurate understanding of the Arab world, with little schooling and no travel experiences there, no Arabic friends. That’s what got me interested. Some of what I picked up struck me as pretty weird, making me suspect it was tainted one way or another. Anybody who knows better, I’d like to hear it - all the above is based on just two books about the Arabic language plus about ten books on Arabic and Muslim history, philosophy, politics, etc.
It all sounds very similar to Hebrew:
[ul]
[li]Written right to left[/li][li]Usually written without vowels[/li][li]Letters with different shapes at different points of the word[/li][li]Many of the words are similar in nature[/li][li]Words are built from a root with person/tense added in the form of prefixes/suffixes to the word.[/li][/ul]
I wonder, as someone who understands Hebrew, how hard it would be to pick up Arabic as well?
Zev Steinhardt
Actually ‘Taliban’ is two students. ‘Talib’ (a common first name) is ‘student.’ Arabic has a funny dual form for two of something, then the plural for more than two.
As does Hebrew, for certain words, anyway.
Yom (pronounced “Yome”) = 1 day
Yomayim = 2 days
X Yomim = X days (where X > 1)
Maybe I should study Arabic…
Zev Steinhardt
You mean where ‘X>2,’ don’t you?
No.
One could say Shnei Yomim meaning “two days” or Yomayim, also meaning “two days.” Do standard plurals in Arabic have to be for three or more, or can they be used for two as well?
Zev Steinhardt
AFAIK, the plural applies only for more than two items, but I’m no expert at all, so I might be mistaken.
It might also be that the formal rules aren’t fully respected in common speech. I remember that when I enquired about the difference in pronounciation between the word for “two teas” and the word for “Satan”, an arabic speaker told me that anyway the dual form of “tea”, though correct, generally wouldn’t be used.
Well…In other words, I’ve no clue. So, maybe someone else could enlighten both of us.
I worked with a fellow in Belguim and Germany for a while who was a bit of a language savant. He had mastered many languages in his quest for a career as a translator for the EU/EC. He had learned Arabic and I found his story of learning the language interesting.
He had travelled to the middle-east to study (I don’t recall specifically where) and he described the program:
The first year they did not learn any Arabic words, phrases, letters, etc. Instead, they learned how an Arabic speaker thinks, how they see the world conceptually, how they interpret the world, how they respond to others, how to “think like an Arab”. Once they had a handle on that, he said, learning the language was easy, it was just a matter of putting the right words to the concepts.
I found that fascinating.
I really loved learning Arabic, (la, 'ana mish majnoon), and even the “hard parts” didn’t seem all that bad. I learned colloquial Arabic (Eastern Arabic, called by many Levantine Arabic) first and then written Arabic a little further on. (Actually, I write Arabic like I speak it, but so do many other people.)
I had many friends studying Classical Arabic (while I was learning colloquial), and they’d learn phrases like “The king is like a lion in war!!” But when it came to speaking Arabic with real people, and doing things like telling the time or ordering food, they found that they had to learn at least a little colloquial Arabic, which I think helped their studies of Classical Arabic in the long run.
One amusing thing happened as I was learning the Arabic alphabet (and my first phrases), was that I was being tutored by an Iranian friend of mine (who spoke Farsi or course), and after practising with him, when I went to speak Arabic for the first time with my Arab friends, they said “You speak Arabic with a Farsi accent!”
Anyway, I found learning Arabic was fun, and once I got used to the new sounds and a bit of the grammar, I could communicate – and I’ll continue to speak, study and learn Arabic from now on.
Treat yourself to learning a few new words each day (especially words that can help you learn even more words.)
And to spice things up, learn a few good swear words.
Well, they’re both Semitic languages, and as languages go are fairly closely related, but have a couple thousand years of history separating them. As a rough analogy I would compare their closeness to that between classical Latin and Greek – different alphabets, one language has more sounds than the other and some of those sounds may be difficult for speakers of the other to pronounce, the grammar pretty much works the same way, and there’s a lot of cognate vocabulary but most of the words are different enough that it’s a bit of work to learn it. Another example might be the difference between English and Dutch, if Dutch were written in a different alphabet.
I don’t know if you’re Sephardic (judging by your username, probably not), but I’ve been told by a Jewish coworker of mine that the Sephards have preserved a lot of gutteral consonantal pronunciation that Arabic has but the Ashkenazi pronunciation has lost.