Many years back, I wanted to learn Arabic, but, the problem is, there isn't one "Arabic". It seems you have to decide, do you want to learn Moroccan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Levantine Arabic, Iraqi Arabic, Quranic Arabic, Modern Arabic...
When faced with this question, I just decided Farsi seemed a lot more interesting and accessible.
This is a misconception I always see online, sometimes by Arabic Teachers and native speakers. While yes, there are a lot of variants, the choice should be made obvious by the teachers (who I blame).
Anyone who wants to learn Arabic, should learn Modern Standard Arabic (or Quranic, they're the same) for these reasons (non-exhaustive):
1- It is the most understood variant, as it is the lingua franca between all Arabic speaking peoples (and beyond).
2- It is similar to most other variants
(Basically it's pretty near the vernacular variants of Peninsular Arabic, and not that far from the Levantine, Egyptian, and North African ones)
3- And MOST IMPORTANTLY : Unlike the vernacular variants, it is a written language with codified rules, clear grammar, and a vast lake of vocabulary resources.
Slightly related rant:
The most annoying idea I see spread all over is the comparison of Arabic and its variants to Latin and romance languages. Which is as misguided as a bent arrow fired from the hip. Latin is dead while MSA is live and kicking, being used daily by millions if not billions of people. Because of the Quranic staticity, Arabic is a pretty much "Frozen in time" language with little evolution. (A phrase written 1600 years ago might still be understood today, unlike in English or French for example)
Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is a good foundation.
Darija (Moroccan Arabic) is probably furthest away because it is heavily influenced by the Berber languages (and Arabs are not the majority in Morocco, they are just the largest minority). Also, Moroccans tend to do lots of context switching to French.
Egyptian Arabic is widely understood everywhere due to Egypt's strong position in the Arabic movie/TV industry.
> It seems you have to decide, do you want to learn Moroccan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Levantine Arabic, Iraqi Arabic, Quranic Arabic, Modern Arabic...
Why do you want to learn Arabic? Answering this question will point you to which dialect to learn..
Do you want to read Arabic? Learn Modern Standard. Do you want to watch television and movies? Learn Egyptian. Do you want to study Islam and the Quran? Learn Quranic. Do you have a particular interest in a region and speaking with the people of that region? Learn the dialect that is predominately spoken there.
Yes, there is Standard Arabic and various Arabic dialects. The Middle Eastern dialects are closer to Standard Arabic while still different. In Morocco, Darija appears to be an Arabic dialect but it's actually more of an Amazigh language that uses approximately 70% Arabic vocabulary, which can be misleading
It depends on why you are trying to learn Arabic. If the goal is to understand quran then standard arabic is going to be your goal. If you want to be able to read arabic text (documents) then it is using standard arabic. If you want to go to arab country except Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia and talk in a way that people will understand you then learn Egyptian dialect. It is the de facto standard dialect due to the media and the fact that about one from each Arab speaker is Egyptian. Then to understand other dialects you will get it by living or engaging with their speakers a little bit while they would be happy to talk sometimes in standard Arabic or Egyptian dialect themselves.
Also Egyptian Arabic tends to be the easiest dialect to learn for a beginner. It makes pronunciation much easier than i.e Iraqi dialect.
If the reason someone wanted to learn Arabic was because they thought they could learn one language to do all of those things, it's clear why they might just drop the idea when they learn they can't.
Farsi or Kurdish you learn twice as fast as Arabic, its good choices for seeing the middle east. The Kurds already love America so it provides easy access to Iraq/KRG/Rojava without getting your head chopped off (there are two dialects of kurdish but Kurmanji worked for me at places of commerce anywhere in Sorani areas).
As I understand it these variants are mostly mutually comprehensible, so you may as well learn modern standard Arabic. The differences come down to pronunciation and the odd extra word.
I think that "mostly" is an overstatement. I saw many Middle Easterns struggling to understand North Africans, to the level of giving up. Living in Sweden now I feel like saying "Arabic" is a bit like saying "Scandinavian" is a language.
I studied linguistics + Persian as my primary language, but also took Arabic and Kurdish (Sorani) and a bunch of smaller, extinct languages (e.g. Middle Persian, Parthian). I'm a native speaker of Polish so approaching Arabic from the perspective of having learned PL/FA first was quite fun:
We had one exercise where we were given two different pieces of text to translate - the same joke in Moroccan and Iraqi dialects. If you showed them to me without much context there's no way I'd assume they belong to the same language.
But this is an extreme example of course (and my Arabic was terrible then, now non-existent)
(I speak Polish and German, and had a short period when I was learning Hebrew while doing some projects for the Jewish Museum in Krakow ((ages ago, in Macromedia Flash times)). That being said, I'm good at forgetting the languages I studied as soon as I stop using them, be it some weird dialect of Middle Persian or Haskell)
They certainly are not. I speak Levantine Arabic and learned MSA in school. I could understand Egyptian Arabic and Khaliji Arabic, but I have no chance understanding anything west of Egypt. There's a lot of extra words, even the simple words are different a lot of the time.
I traveled once to Egypt and the tour guide was delighted that I spoke Arabic. We started speaking in Arabic, but after a few minutes we switched back to English because we couldn't form complete sentences without any of us saying "What?".
My understanding is that MSA is understandable by most arabs thanks to media exposure but it's kinda like the transatlantic accent in that nobody speaks it natively.
Morroccan arabic is the most different one as they have strong spanish and french influences so it is less intelligible.
Egyptian Arabic is considered the standard Arabic language dialect.
I find it odd that Egyptian is used as the standard Arabic dialect. From what I understand Egyptian Arabic is heavily influenced by ancient Egyptian. I would have assumed standard Arabic would be based on a dialect from Arabia (now Saudi Arabia).
Egypt wasn't Arab until about the early 600s although I'm sure many people of Arab descent (Hejaz, Njad, etc) were there for many years. So to base the language on a place not Arab until only 1,400 years ago seems very recent to me.
One example I saw of an old ancient Egyptian word in modern Egyptian was the word "titi" meaning "to walk slowly". Egyptians now pronounce it "tata". But an example (from the link) " ‘Nefertiti’ means ‘the beauty walking slowly’ ". https://www.arabicwithhamid.com/ancient-egyptian-words-still...
When faced with this question, I just decided Farsi seemed a lot more interesting and accessible.