Learning Arabic

John McWhorter wants more Americans to learn Arabic and has some tips. An excerpt:

There is something faintly gruesome in the fact that as schoolchildren nationwide are mastering the likes of bonjour and ni hao, among the 1,000 workers at the American Embassy in Iraq, the number of people who speak Arabic is six. At the FBI, out of 12,000, it is 33.

We are told that we should learn one of the Romance or Germanic languages in order to gain familiarity with another culture. The culture that America needs to make contact with most, though, is Arab, and especially in the context of military and intelligence gathering.

The common riposte is that there are also translators who work on call. But still, imagine if in the American Embassy in France only five people could have a conversation in French, even with scattered French speakers “on call.”