The two main varieties of Arabic are Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and colloquial, or dialectal Arabic. MSA is the language of Arabic media, news and virtually all forms of written material. Local dialects are spoken and differ from one another to varying degrees. Local dialects display influences from surrounding languages--the Arabic of Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria features vocabulary from French and some pronunciation characteristics influenced from Berber, the language of the indigenous North African people. Egyptian Arabic borrows some words from English, due to British colonization. The Arabic of one country may be unintelligible to speakers from another country, making foreign study of Arabic a daunting task. The Egyptian dialect is a common choice for Arabic language students, as Egypt produces a large portion of Arabic media, making the dialect familiar across the Arab world.
Arabic uses its own alphabet, which consists of 28 letters. Words and sentences are written right to left, though numbers go from left to right. The Arabic alphabet is phonetic, meaning the letters correspond to sounds that are always pronounced in the same manner. Only the "long vowels" (vowels with pronounced stress) are written, but the Qur'an (the Holy Book of Islam), children's books and elementary textbooks for language learners will spell words with symbols representing the unstressed vowels to aid in pronunciation. In the case of the Qur'an, the short vowels ensure correct pronunciation of the religious text when spoken aloud.
Words with related meanings have a common three-letter stem, so once you have a basic foundation of Arabic vocabulary, you can guess other similar word meanings in context; "kitab" is "book," "kitaba" is "writer" and "maktab" is "office," the related stem being "ktb."
The three forms of expressing quantity of nouns in Arabic are the singular, dual and plural. To express two of a noun, the suffix "ayn" is added. The plural form of a noun will be a different word from the singular form; "kamis" is "shirt," "kamisayn" is "two shirts" and "kumsan" is three or more shirts.
Arabic has sounds that native English speakers often find difficult to pronounce. To hear native speakers of Arabic pronouncing sounds from various Arabic dialects, watch Arabic films, listen to Arabic pop, or listen to examples of spoken Arabic on websites such as Omniglot.com.