[ztravis]

I absolutely agree - Arabic is a beautiful language and a joy to learn, and it is particularly appealing for those who enjoy structure and regularity (e.g. CS and math folk!). Be forewarned, though - the significant differences between MSA (modern standard Arabic, the focus of most "Arabic" courses/material) and regional/national dialects (and the differences between those various dialects themselves) may make it a bit less practical than you'd hope (and a source of disappointment when you go to actually speak with people!).

Permit me to plug a pet project of mine:

http://arabicreference.com

It's basically an online version of Hans Wehr, the de facto standard dictionary for students of Arabic. You can search by root or by word and provides form I vowelling, masadir (infinitives), broken plurals, and other useful information organized by form. I know there exist other good dictionaries out there, but I never found one I quite liked as a reference as much as I enjoyed Hans Wehr. I hope someone else finds it useful! (I've been neglecting it a bit recently, so I apologize for any bugs and for the lack of an SSL cert).

[ammaristotle]

You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for something like this, without the time to implement it myself. All these years I’ve had to use http://ejtaal.net/mr/ but it’s just getting quite cumbersome.

Do you have any plans to open source the work you’ve done and allow contributions from the outside? I could easily see value in doing this for Lane’s Lexicon as well.

[jnbiche]

Hans Wehr's dictionary is awesome. How did you get permission to use it online?

[jnbiche]

I'll try to answer my own question: I knew Wehr's dictionary was fairly old, but it may be old enough that it has entered public domain. There are still major publishers that publish the dictionary, but it may well be public domain.