Excellent article on a very logical language. However this part:
> No other language will make you work as hard to avoid speaking formally to pairs of women
Arabs actually don't speak this formal way and may look at you strange if you do (they may not even understand in countries like Libya or Egypt); most of the colloquial dialects skip most of these rules, and don't deal the difference between "those two females ran" vs "those two males ran" vs "those males ran", etc.
But author summarizes it:
> The second is that spoken Arabic has diverged substantially from the written language, so you can study it formally for years and not be able to understand a television commercial
> No other language will make you work as hard to avoid speaking formally to pairs of women
Arabs actually don't speak this formal way and may look at you strange if you do (they may not even understand in countries like Libya or Egypt); most of the colloquial dialects skip most of these rules, and don't deal the difference between "those two females ran" vs "those two males ran" vs "those males ran", etc.
But author summarizes it:
> The second is that spoken Arabic has diverged substantially from the written language, so you can study it formally for years and not be able to understand a television commercial