powpowpower

Arabic is not an easy language to learn. For every rule, there are ten exceptions to it, at least, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
First, there are more than a handful of letters that don't exist in English nor in any other Occidental language. There are letters for the four 'k' sounds, two 'h' sounds, two 's' sounds, two 't' sounds, two 'd' sounds, three 'th' sounds; there are no 'p' or 'v' or 'ch' sounds. There is also the ordinary glottal stop, as well as the "violent, tense glottal stop" which is made by using muscles whose only other function is to aid vomiting. There is also the dark 'l' found only in Allah. The most difficult though, is the special H, which unfortunately is pretty common. Of the vowels: there are three written, two of which are also consonants, and three unwritten. They make 8 standard vowel sounds. More, certain letters are elided in pronunciation by their proximity to sun or moon letters. Arabic is phonetic, which would be nice if all of the sounds are written, and if it were physically possible to pronounce them all. But the phoneticism is still handy, although since it's script (or Squiggley as it is more aptly known) there are hundreds of accepted ligatures. Each letter has a few different forms depending on where it is in a word. Arabic reads right to left, except numbers. The numbers used in English are actually Arabic numbers and the numbers used here are actually Indian, don't ask me why. Transliterations are always different too, some are phonetic and some aren't, some use letters where others use apostrophes, and the apostrophe could mean any number of sounded or not-sounded consonants (really, I don't even know what a syllable is anymore).
Lexus depends always, entirely on context. There are three words which can mean yes or no depending on the question's context. I read a word the other day which could mean white, black, or light red. The joke is that most words mean one thing, the opposite, or something about a camel. Grammar structure is different than English, but I won't go into that.
That all is actually the easy part, first you must decide which Arabic to study. Fus-Ha, Quranic, Modern Standard (MSA), or whatever local dialect is spoken where you are. As I understand it, Fus-Ha is the traditional language that all current Arabic has stemmed from. When the Quran was being written, scholars decided that Fus-Ha wasn't adequate to write the holy scripture, so they pretty much invented Quranic Arabic out of love for Allah (which, good grief, that's pretty awesome). By studying Quranic you would inevitably learn Fus-Ha, but unless you're devoted to reading the Quran, there's not much point. MSA was formatted for the business world and as far as I know nobody uses it, but for some reason two-thirds of all learn Arabic books I found in the states were teaching MSA. What's spoken everywhere is any number of local dialects. In Aden they speak Adeni, and cannot be understood 100km away, at all. Moroccan Arabic is immensely different from Yemeni, as is Egyptian or Lebanese. The good thing is that newspapers and tv all use Fus-Ha, so most people understand Fus-Ha. The bad thing is that when you speak Fus-Ha only, you're responded to in the local dialect. A friend of mine who speaks Arabic actually just went to Morocco and said he relied on his French. Since humanity basically started in Yemen, there's a language tie here also. In Yemen as a country, and Ta'izz as a city there exists the purest Arabic and quite a number of people come to study as a result. That, and it's wicked cheap if you exclude the travel overhead. Having a native speaker is essential, so studying outside of the Middle East is fairly futile.
Arabic is difficult to learn for more than just linguistic reasons, but political as well. Within the American media industry there are only three Arabic translators, and given the geolinguistic issues I mentioned above, I find it hard to reason that those three can accurately interperet concepts coming from somewhere that is so foreign to American that it is almost its opposite. The three are all registered republicans, and they all recieved their language training from the military. In fact, outside of the military, there exist only three scholarships available to Americans for studying Arabic. As of 2007, there haven't been any American Fulbrighters awarded Arabic language study in almost ten years. This reeks. And I'll tell you why:
People here want you to learn their language. My students are always teaching me words. As soon as my classes learned how to give advice using 'should,' they all told me I should learn Arabic. Every single Adeni I've met has asked me where I'm studying Arabic and when I tell them I'm not they offer to teach me or to find someone who will. Whenever a foreigner says one word in Arabic, we are immediately met with the excited response, "Oh you know Arabic?!" People here are incredibly kind and helpful to begin with, but extravagantly so when it comes to their language.
So, I'm very slowly learning Arabic, both Fus-Ha and Adeni. I can count to six, I can tell people where I'm from and that I'm a teacher and that I don't know Arabic, I can buy produce mostly with pointing, I can use mass transit which strangely enough involves even more pointing, and I can tell people that I really like Yemen and think it's beautiful. Well, in so many words.

marginals

Unity between North and South Yemen was made in 1990 and there was a civil war in 1994 to little effect but the repeated marginalization of the south. Civil war in Yemen is going to happen again but nobody really knows for sure when. There has been some civil unrest here in the south which has prompted reactions from the governing north. Seven have died in Mukalla (where I'm trying to get transferred) during rallies held by secessionists that have turned into riots by the pro-government militia Guards of Unity. The newspaper al-Ayyam, the employer of a friend of Taryn, has been shut down along with six others for allegdly promoting a "harmed national unity." Revoking freedom of press and speech will undoubtedly fan the fire.
Yemen still has no cases of swine flu, or H1N1. Similar to in Israel, under sharia, referring to pigs is Haram. Unlike Israel though, we're not stupidly calling it the Mexican flu.

Obvious History and Geography

Yemen has been conquered a lot. The most obvious time being when the Islamic Caliphate took power in 630 AD, before that there was a lot of tribalism (still is, too) and rule from various powers you've never heard of so I won't mention them. Previous to the Suez Canal, the Port of Aden was a major hub for commerce, and has been held throughout the centuries by the Egyptian Ayyud, the Ottomans, and the Dutch. After the construction of the Canal Aden has been controlled by the British and the Russians most recently. Some of the traffic circles show this history with sculptures of an Ottoman bridge now gone and a Dutch style windmill. My apartment is former RAF barracks by the airport, and my landlord is half Russian and half Yemeni left over from the Russian rule. Because of the tawdry influence of foreigners and the seafaring type, Aden has a long reputation for being fairly liberal and tolerant. Rimbaud lived here for a while, and I feel incredibly safe. Also, because of the deluge of historical influences, Aden is known as the New Orleans of the Middle East (thus my blog title). Beirut being the Paris, Dubai the New York, and probably other Occidentalist names have been made to undermine the autonomy of the region as if they couldn't do that themselves. Anyways! North Yemen and South Yemen unified to form the country as it is now in 1990, and Aden has adhered to traditional Islamic mores most noticably by covering up the women and prohibiting alcohol to make the Sana'ani more comfortable here or something. The north/south fued is very noticable as I'm sure I'll continue to mention. The geography of the city of Aden itself(see map) is actually four different cities on a peninsula and bay. Crater is the old city (rebuilt unfortunately) located within a dormant volcanic crater. I live in Khormaksar to the to the north, and there are others that I have yet to explore enough to warrant writing about, such as Tawahi, the Aden Free Zone, and Little Aden across the bay.