I'll play devils advocate here. Their solution is too complex and tries to fix a non-problem.
For someone learning Arabic the letters are the first of many challenging steps. I learned the Arabic letters in 1 day with flashcards. That single day was easy compared with everything that came afterwards. Using a romanized scripts makes all these subsequent steps with grammar and accents much harder.
I can see how this would be helpful in accurately learning new accents, but accents are notoriously inaccurate and flexible, the Arabic letters leave that flexibility, outside of academic text Romanized letters would require so many exceptions that it be like nailing jello to a wall.
It would be useful for news organizations if this system was applied across many languages so that we can always spell and pronounce names correctly.
The use of non-english keyboard letters creates complexity. I much prefer the use of number replacements for letters that teens use when texting. sa7?
For someone learning Arabic the letters are the first of many challenging steps. I learned the Arabic letters in 1 day with flashcards. That single day was easy compared with everything that came afterwards. Using a romanized scripts makes all these subsequent steps with grammar and accents much harder.
I can see how this would be helpful in accurately learning new accents, but accents are notoriously inaccurate and flexible, the Arabic letters leave that flexibility, outside of academic text Romanized letters would require so many exceptions that it be like nailing jello to a wall.
It would be useful for news organizations if this system was applied across many languages so that we can always spell and pronounce names correctly.
The use of non-english keyboard letters creates complexity. I much prefer the use of number replacements for letters that teens use when texting. sa7?