Hi everyone! I've been thinking about trying to improve my Arabic for a while and have finally decided to start posting in Arabic in addition to the other languages I've been posting in or about on UniLang so far. I'm mainly familiar with Damascene Arabic and MSA because I have a copy of Mastering Arabic (which teaches MSA) right here in my room and the last time I was seriously studying any Arabic was when I was taking a seminar (in grad school) with a few non-native speakers of Damascene Arabic who spoke it with each other every day. They had used Syrian Colloquial Arabic, a Functional Course as their textbook for learning it, so I accessed what little I could of it (the first three chapters used to be available online for free along with the audio for each one, but they gradually got rid of this free offer). I know a tiny bit of Egyptian Arabic, have read a bit about Darija (Moroccan Arabic), and have heard bits of Hassaniya (from Mauritania), Chadian, Najdi, Hejazi (both from Saudi Arabia; I once posted a bilingual video with phrases in Najdi and Hejazi accompanied by a written translation into English), Yemeni, and maybe some Gulf varieties and even Tajiki Arabic, as well as Maltese if that counts.
I learned how to make pharyngeals (the only two sounds I couldn't pronounce in Arabic until then, i.e. ح and ع) from my Syrian Arabic-speaking classmates, then wanted to try them out and see whether I was pronouncing them correctly. So one of my classmates suggested that when another one of their group walked in, she'd ask her to ask me how I was, and then I could say الحمدلله بخير. Then she'd get her to ask me whether she could borrow my pen, and I'd hand it over and say تكرم عينك, which literally means something like "may your eye be blessed" but is apparently a common expression to use in certain situations such as when handing something over.
At that time, I also discovered Al-Hudoud (1987), particularly this clip from it. It used to be on YouTube (where I had found it back then), but they removed it:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2qc60y