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As an educator,I am always being asked about that. The only way to answer this is to answer another question: what do you want to do with Arabic? Is your goal to read a newspaper? Scholarly journals? The Qu'ran? Do you want to chat with people in the Arab world? If so, in which country? If you are interested in the printed word, you should study Modern Standard Arabic. If you are interested in reading the Qu'ran, you should study Qu'ranic Arabic . If you want to talk to people about everyday subjects such as their lives, their jobs, or their opinions, you will need to study Colloquial Arabic. Despite what people may tell you, it is possible to study both MSA and colloquial Arabic at the same time [2].
No matter what flavor of Arabic you decide to study, lay out your goals for the short and long term. This will help you chart your progress. Don't worry about the curriculum of a school or a university. If you are reaching your own goals, then you're making concrete progress in Arabic. Those goals may change as you learn more about the language and Arabic culture.
What's the best colloquial dialect?
Wherever you travel in the Arabic-speaking world, the people will tell you that their dialect is the purest and closest to Classical Arabic. All of the dialects have evolved beyond Classical Arabic, and these differences are heard most often in everyday speech.
Television and movies have made the Egyptian dialect the most widely understood throughout the Arab world.If you speak colloquial Egyptian, you will probably be understood by many Arabic speakers--but this does not mean that you'll understand them. As someone wrote, an Egyptian might be able to go to Gulf and talk about politics or literature, but he might have problems if he went to a store and asked for a loaf of bread. There seems to be some major groups of colloquial Arabic:
- Egyptian (possibly including the Sudan) - Maghrebi, used in the North African countries of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria - Levantine, used in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine - Gulf Arabic, used in the Emirates, Kuwait, possibly Saudi Arabia (?) - Iraqi
Here's how you'd say "how are you?" to a man on the street: - Egyptian: izzayak? - Levantine: keefak? - Iraqi: shloonak?
I have no idea about the dialects spoken in Yemen, but I hear (of course) it's close to Classical Arabic.
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