I've been in the UAE for a little over 6 months and can hold my own in the occasional short conversation or two. I'm getting to the point where I can speed read stuff written in Arabic. Understanding what's written though is a slower process since I have decipher everything word by word rather than crunch an entire sentence.
It's just that I can't seem to join words together into meaningful sentences and no matter how hard I try, words just don't come naturally as I have to pause and think before I speak.
Are there any non-Arabs on here who speak very fluently in Arabic? When I first came here, I thought learning Arabic would be pretty easy, much like Spanish and Italian. But boy oh boy I couldn't have been more wrong!