Learning Arabic

I have a new short-term goal: to learn a few travel-essential phrases in Arabic for my upcoming trip to Cairo, Egypt for Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW). 75 countries around the world will be participating, but here's the link for the Cairo site: http://www.unleashingideas.org/egypt .

I will be leading a half-day workshop on cross-cultural communications issues in global business. And since language and culture are at the root of it all, it is only fitting that I make an effort to do a crash-course in Arabic language and related culture before I go! I have 5 weeks before my departure so it doesn't leave much time. I've been doing a lot of reading on Egyptian culture, and now I will be looking online for good self-study sites for language learning. I'll be sure to report any particularly useful findings. Do you have any suggestions? If so, please share!

Of course, I'll also need to follow my own advice from previous blogs. Wish me luck and stay tuned!