If you speak Arabic

LL   Wed Jan 21, 2009 4:49 am GMT
and you are not a native speaker, would you tell us how you learned it.?
I'm primarily interested in people who learned it out of the love of learning languages or for business reasons.

If you learned it-what variety of Arabic did you learn and how have you used it, and where?

Thank-you.
I-sea-you...No, really, e   Wed Jan 21, 2009 6:27 pm GMT
I was taught to read Arabic as a small child because my family is Muslim and we were homeschooled, and it was required that during 2nd grade we read the entire Quran in Arabic during the year, so I was taught the alphabet and phonics of the language between 4 and 6. I think I was five but anyway...

My dad learned Arabic when he was a young man and new Muslim because he wanted to have access to a wider variety of religious texts and Arabic speakers, from him we picked up a handful of basic phrases and words growing.

I expressed interest in foreign language from an early age, and I liked Arabic and Spanish simply because I actually could've learned them! My dad could speak Arabic and my mom Spanish, (they'd learned during their university years) I used to beg them to teach me but they never could/did because they weren't able to commit to the task (to tell you the truth, they didn't really try, either.)

When I was 8 we had an Arabic tutor who was teaching us to read and write (we already knew how) and speak some arabic. We didn't get far with him but we did learn some new phrases and words, but we weren't using books or anythings, he'd write on the board and talk and we'd listen without comprehension. It was highly ineffective.

When I was 10 we had another Arabic tutor who came, we used books and I made progress in that class. When those lessons stopped, I maintained my own meager Arabic knowledge and when I was 14, my whole family (parents, aunts, cousins, siblings--the whole shebang) took an extensive Arabic class at the Mosque because my dad had made a deal with the Community Counsel that if they started the class (hired the teacher) he would get them 20 students to attend.

Thats when my Arabic got alot better and I have lost alot of it sense then, but I still browse my old books from when I was 10 and 14 and I hope to take an Arabic class in University.

I've studied Classical and Modern Standard Arabic. Those classes I had as an 8 year old where in an Arabic variation known as warsh, I think thats how you spell it.

I want to master Modern Standard Arabic though, because its the most useful in this world today and I could still use it to understand religious texts if I want too.
blanc   Wed Jan 21, 2009 6:33 pm GMT
I've learnt Arabic without reading religious texts, I'm an atheist!