Boyd: I worried about dialects washing over each other for a while, then I stopped worrying. Arabs are far more likely to try to figure out what you're trying to say than, say, the French who upon hearing a grammatical error, cock the snoot and dismiss you on the spot.

What did not help my Arabic, though, was finishing an 8-month course in Arabic on a Friday, then starting a French refresher the next Monday. That took a couple of weeks to sort out.

I wasn't arguing that a dozen words was literate. But that if you can pick up a dozen words so easily with out tutor or formal study, studying to get the 3 to 4 thousand words needed for literacy would not be an impossible task for the western mind.

Personally, I find speaking intelligibly or hearing it much harder, but I suspect that has to do with my total lack of musical ability.

I'll always remember the amusement in the eyes of my comrades in the Sudanese Navy (that oughta give you a clue how long ago this was) when we pulled into Port Sudan for a visit. At a dinner (that few of my fellow sailors took advantage of; goat as the premier entrée drove them away) that our hosts threw for us, I tried to communicate with my new friends, but I had this nasty tendency to use one Egyptian word (good for Sudan), one Syrian word, one Iraqi word, one Saudi word, one Yemeni (specifically, Adeni) word, one Libyan word...well, you get the idea.

I'm just thankful I really didn't know anything Maghrebi. That would have likely spurred my Spanish memories and brought everything to a crashing halt. As it was, I was the hit of the night. Mostly, I'm sure, because they were laughing at me, not with me. :)

In my work in Public Diplomacy, I needed to use (or at least work around) myriad specialized vocabularies that simply weren't taught at FSI. 'Tri-phase electric supply'? Sorting out my driver's cry for replacement 'iblatine' (Arabic pronunciation of 'platinum', but colloquially 'spark plug')?

I took an advanced Arabic course in Cairo that was pretty much invented on the spot. It usefully combined reading the Quran, Egyptian high school and university texts, and lots of 'field trips' into non-tourist Egypt. Those trips would have been useful in every Arabic country in which I've served.

One last anecdote: My wife, who accompanied me on my assignments, tried to keep up with my Arabic studies, though gov't funding for her studies was limited, shall we say. But she gamely worked on Maghrebi, Gulf, Classical, Modern Standard, and Egyptian.

The night we arrived in Damascus, from Cairo, I turned on the TV to catch the news. I left the room for a moment only to come back with her cursing a blue streak about the perfidies of Arabic. Here she was watching the news. She could pick up occasional words, but couldn't make any sense of what was being said.

I listened in and found myself equally baffled for a while. Then it all came clear: We were watching a Jordanian TV broadcast in Hebrew. Lots of vocabulary overlap; absolutely no useful grammatical similarities. She did figure out Shami (Syrian) Arabic even though it had its own perverse pronunciation of certain letters, different from the Egyptian perversions... little things like choosing not to pronounce the letter 'q' in common words, but always pronouncing it if the word was 'classical'.

I'm the other way around.

Heh. Me, too, with regards to German. I was never at anything close to Level 5 proficiency. I could hold an intelligent conversation with a 12-year-old and order chow but certainly not read tech manuals.

Same for Chinese. I've heard a self professed level 5 Chinese (Mandarin) peaker doing his Mandarin, and it was atrocious. I don't doubt for a second he could read and understand government publications, but he would be lost trying to get directions or buy himself a decent meal at a regular restaurant. I'm the other way around.

The one everyone starts with--and which is most likely to be what is taught in a university course--is called Modern Standard Arabic. It's what's used in Arabic international news broadcasts and the pan-Arab media, unless there's a particular reason for using something else.

Beyond that, there are several broad categories of Arabic.

Maghrebi Arabic is the collection of dialects spoken in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. The dialects make, more or less, the same pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammatical choices, many based of course, on Classical (Quranic) Arabic (in Arabic, 'Fus-ha'). There is an enormous admixture of Berber, however, which is a non-Semitic languages to begin with.

Next up is Egyptian, spoken obviously in Egypt. It has an odd collection of vocabulary based on Greek or Italian roots, pushed (with more or less force) into Arabic patterns. It's also enormously inventive, creating words that work in Arabic out of other foreign words. For instance, the 10th form of Arabic verbs (with the prefix 'ista') implies a sense of seeking to do or be something. Egyptians have taken the name of the car Mercedes and created the word 'istamerced', 'to aspire to own a Mercedes'.

Then there's Levantine, spoken in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine. You find a lot of Turkish loan words here, as well as French, left over from the Mandate period and refreshed through political/cultural connections.

Gulf Arabic is just that: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, Yemen, and Oman. Again, these are generalized into the same pool. There are many loan words from Farsi, Urdu, and Hindi here, as well as some African languages in Oman. Bahrain, an island of some 300 sq. mi., has over 20 dialects, the use of which will instantly identify the village from which the speaker comes.

Finally, there is Iraqi Arabic. It share similarities with Gulf Arabic in some regards, with Levantine in others, and is unique in yet other aspects. Farsi, Turkic, and of course Kurdish flavor the language here.

Modern Standard serves the educated (it's only learned in schools) as the 'universal Arabic'. Arabs with university educations can readily communicate with each other across the Arab world.

An uneducated Iraqi is going to need an interpreter to talk with an uneducated Moroccan; the differences in pronunciation and vocabulary choice are just too vastly different. There's a funny story about a member of a major Kuwaiti business family by the name of Zamil, turning up at a Moroccan airport. Immigration asked his name and simply wouldn't accept his answers as the word 'zamil' in Moroccan slang stands for/stood for something along the line of 'flaming faggot'.

I'm told there are similar issues with Spanish and Latin American Spanish, with Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese.

Egyptian Arabic, due largely to the overwhelming presence of Egyptian media (films and TV in particular, radio less importantly now) is sort of an informal standard for the less-educated. They're simply exposed to masses of it and can comprehend it, if not replicate it.

Anyone speaking in good, clear, Classical Arabic will either bring people to tears or set them into a fit of giggles, depending on context. Use it in a lecture or speech, and you weaken knees. Use it in buying tomatoes or shoes at the local market and you'll be a great source of amusement for weeks to come!

As far as becoming literate in Chinese, I was able to pick up quite a few written words from context. Variation in scripts (advertising seems to be the worst for me) might give me trouble, but I could quickly pick them out on road signs, etc. Writing them (apparently the order you make the strokes and where you start the pen can be important) and saying them is very different.

Picking up a few characters here and there isn't literacy any more than recognizing the “STOP” on the stop sign is.