[Sithsaber]

Recently i've been considering an attempt to at least dabble in arabic but it turns out that would be even more difficult than I thought. It seems "Arabic" is more of a language group than a cohesive language, kind of like latin apparently. You've got your liturgical arabi that stems from the classic source, written arabic which according to what i've heard is close to a muslim version of italian, and the regional dialects which supposedly are like the romance languages give or take. Could somebody with some knowledge on this give me some first hand accounts on the mutual intelligibility of the various tongues (are they like spanish and Portuguese or far more divergent even when in relative proximity) and which version I should learn if any (i'd guess the written arabic but i don't know how often it is spoken and if the average person is even fluent in it.) I doubt I'd seriously invest in the liturgical branch seeing how i have no interest in hanging around madrassas.

[emmitt]

I'd say that Arabic is basically a continuum. Some "dialects" are fairly similar and therefore mutually intelligible. It depends on the geographical proximity as you might have expected. Countries that are close to each other speak dialects that are almost the same. If the countries are in completely different parts of the Arab world, it'll be much harder and you might even say it's almost impossible to understand the dialects without further study.
The dialects mostly differ in terms of phonology even though there are grammatical and lexical differences as well. If you wanted to understand even more dialects, you'd have to familiarize yourself with their phonologies. (There are some sound changes which aren't that difficult.)

Many students usually learn Egyptian Arabic because it's by far the most useful one (I know, I know, that's a pretty subjective statement). Many Arabs watch Egyptian tv shows and movies. If I were you, I'd go for it.

I had to take 8 courses of MSA (Modern Standard Arabic) for my bachelor's degree. I enjoyed it thorougly. But I'm generally quite interested in languages. I dabbled in Palestinian and Egyptian Arabic but I prefer MSA since I'm much more into written languages.

If you've learnt Hebrew or Aramaic, it'd be much easier for you. Both languages are very similar to the dialectal varieties of spoken Arabic. MSA would be harder since it has got 3 cases and grammatical moods. (BTW: Arabic is a bit tough since you need to learn all the "broken" plurals. They can be a pain in the neck. )