I'm thinking about learning Arabic - no need for dire warnings, I've already heard about open and closed words, word-morphing, and horror stories about 3-forms of each letter, no-vowel writing, 13-form verbs and so on...
But I need some advice - which version would be the most practically useful from the standpoint of someone who doesn't plan to travel to any given Arabic country, but may still need to speak it without sounding too weird. Is Classical Arabic really the best way to go, or would I do better to learn Gulf Arabic or another dialect?
...I guess what I'm saying is, sure Classical Arabic will be understood by most any Arabic speaker, but if I learned Gulf Arabic for example, would many people understand me outside the several countries that normally speak it? Maybe Egyptian would be more useful because of their prolific movie industry?
>>5
That was witty and well thought out... I guess you'd be an imperialist limey because you speak English then?
I know this is 4chan, but wtf... is the foreign language forum just for the latest "let's speak Japanese!" thread and blatant racism?
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Anonymous2006-07-21 17:13
>>6
I think what you meant to say was, "I know this is 4chan, but wtf... I'll try to be a morally righteous asshat anyway."
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Anonymous2006-07-21 17:25
Morally righteous asshat for not assuming 230 million Arabic speakers are terrorists? What kind of shallow fear-driven world do you live in?
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Anonymous2006-07-21 21:03
>>8
LOL 'cause you took my post in >>5 seriously. Get real you faggot. I'm quite well aware that not all speaker of Arabic are terrorists. It's just that, well...you see... I HAVE SENSE OF HUMOR! You on the other hand probably have a poll shoved so far up your ass that you can't laugh at anything that might be offensive. Good luck learning your moon language, chump.
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Anonymous2006-07-22 5:27
>>9
It falls flat as a joke, so it's just an ignorant attack.
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Anonymous2006-07-22 11:14
If I were you, I'd go with Classical Arabic because MOHAMMED MOHAMMED JIHAD
open and closed words - closed are easy, open just means you need to memorize then two or three times
word-morphing - easy because they mostly follow the same rules, kinda
horror stories about 3-forms of each letter - wow, this you can learn in one hour, i did
no-vowel writing - this one takes a few months to get used to i guess
13-form verbs most verbs you only need to know like 3 or so, and there are really only 10 forms, the other 6 or so are for obscure words only
yea learn MSA, modern standard arabic, it is really the only one you need, most every one can understand it easily, of course, they may not be able to speak it well, but there are too many dialects for you to focus on one and expect to speak with any arab you want to
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Anonymous2007-08-22 16:03 ID:TNLGB+tK
>>1
The most useful Arabic is the one you can use to mount epic jihad on ebaums