Considering the circumstances, do you think it would be good to learn Arabic?

Do you think there are enough English/Arabic speakers in the world today?

What other languages are spoken in the Middle East?

What do you want to learn Arabic for? To make sure the CIA puts you on their "suspect terrorist" list and the NSA listens to all your phone calls?  

But seriously, I don't get your point. I have to admit I am vaguely interested in learning a bit more about the language, because of the funny way they write backwards and because a religious friend of mine says the skilled use of the Arabic language in the Qu'ran convinces him there is a god, as no human could ever get the combination of poetry, meaning and grammar as right as the writers of tha book, and that argument intrigues me.

But for now, I won't even think about learning the language. Too much other stuff to do, too paranoid about evil privacy-infringing US secret services to bother...

Regards

Ikarus

Well, I speak hebrew (ivrit) and we have curses that we took from Arabic. Arabic is one of the hardest languages in the world to know. Are you wanting to communicate with Osama or something? I say learn something else.

My reason comes from this:

>>September 17, 2001, Message From the FBI Director About Need for Linguists:
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, III, to the American public: "On September 17, I asked for assistance from our citizens with Arabic language capability. The Arabic-American community and others immediately overwhelmed our telephone switchboard. I want to thank you for your tremendous response and support. Individuals who are interested in assisting us should now apply on-line at www.fbijobs.com."<<-fbi.gov

It seems to me that in the future government and private organizations around the world will need people who speak Arabic. Similar to the demand of people who speak Russian that was seen during the Cold War.

I know Farsi which is spoken in Iran.

oh yeah Farsi is also spoken in Afghanistan

Arabic isn't so hard. After I visited the middle east a few times I tried to learn it, I've always wanted to learn a language which uses a different alphabet instead of the usual French / German / Spanish thing. I had a go at Greek but although I love the country I wasn't interested in it enough to persue it. Once you've cracked the Arabic alphabet (which I did) you're cooking with gas but not a single word in Arabic sounds like the English equivalent so you don't get any headstarts like "l'automobile", "la banque", "le discotheque". I got bored and went back to surfing Airliners.net but I would have liked to have gone back to it. My views have changed a little since 9/11/01, I just don't see myself visiting the area for quite a while and while wearing my Hard Rock Cafe Beirut t-shirt is probably OK, I don't know how smart it is to be seen showing such a profound interest in the Arab world right now. Which sucks.

Being able to write girls names in a foreign alphabet at parties is always a bonus btw. Of course, to do this you only need to learn the characters of the alphabet (about 72), not the actual language. Again, since the 9/11, it's probably not so impressive, more likely to result in a call to the local constabulary.

My friend who is from over there, says it's very hard for an american to learn their language, because everyone has different Pronunciations.

True, the accents vary wildly. My ex-MEA flight engineer friend (Comet 4 and 707) moved to Kuwait and flew for KU during the war, and he said he could barely understand the TV news cos Gulf Arabic is so different to Meditteranean Arabic. I was learning the Levant version, ie Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt et al.

True.....difference in accents not only between gulf countries and countries in the syria region.....but there are differences in the Gulf as well.......Bahrainis have a way of talking different from Kuwaitis and Saudis.
But the biggest difference is so big that it should be named language altoghether......im talking about the arabic that is spoken in Morocco,Algeria ...Tunisia. It is a weird mixture of french and Arabic..... mainstream arabic speakers hardly undertstand this dialect.

When i was in Israel... I spoke English and le Francais... they made it easy for me  

I've now lost hopes of learning hebrew...