The great news with MSA: you don’t have to worry about practicing to speak it which works perfectly with your style, but yeah I agree that If reading is the priority, MSA is a must.
the hardest thing is the annoying omission of vowels in text… it’s a huge pain in the beginning. I’m interested to see how steve deals with MSA arabic grammar, I thought it was more complicated than russian.
Mr.Steve,
please rest assured that you are not alone in this journey, in fact, me and my tribe 
and all Arabs are with you.
Rest assured you will speak the language one day, and that day is very soon.
Good luck with your Turkish. I guess, you will learn Arabic and Farsi first and then move to Turkish. The Turkish grammar is different than these both languages’ however we borrowed a lot of words from Farsi and Arabic which makes the Turkish language difficult to learn for foreigners. I look forward to see your videos about the language and the turkish literature.
Did you consider this Arabic reader?
I notice it seems to get good reviews. I think it’s made up of traditional short stories/proverbs - so not exactly stories for children.
MSA is the only way to go when you’re starting. It’s universally understood and everything worth reading is written in it. Also, it’s closer to the fuSha, the classical Arabic. When the MSA approaches the classical is where you’ll find the real beauty in the language, along with a sort of mathematical syntax that’s very satisfying when you get it down. People who study Arabic seriously tend to get obsessed with it. It’s hard but rewarding.
Über-complex for sure! But it is maybe more regular than Russian morphology?
Yeah, and aside from literature quite a lot of Arabic TV and radio that can be tapped into here in the West is also in MSA, isn’t it?
From what I have gathered (I am also starting to learn Arabic), most if not all news is using MSA. MSA is also the official dialect in the UN, which is why I personally am focusing on MSA. Luckily for us, there are many speakers of MSA in the language learning community, so to me it is not “useless” to learn MSA as I will be able to practice and read what I am interested in.
Nope
I’m still struggling with the lack of vowels and vocalization markers in Hebrew. Some things are too difficult to hear in native level speech. There are some youth stories with vowels I’d like to be able to read in Hebrew. Even if its a silly story about a missing dog.
At least Arabic words don’t seem to have quite as many different meanings as Hebrew words, but I think it will be a long time to read even the modern dystopian novels in Arabic.
Make Arabic Great Again!
Everyone in North Africa and the Middle East understands MSA. Its the language of news broadcasts, magazines and officialdom. Also, it’s what’s taught in schools, although a shocking number of Arabs are illiterate (something like 48% of Moroccans and 26% of Iraqi adults are illiterate). The other reason to learn MSA is that everything worth reading in Arabic is written in MSA or classical. Even Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel Prize winner, wrote his Cairo novels in fuSha, not Egyptian dialect.
I started with the language 30 some years ago, and have studied it professionally and academically since, and I’ve never see a good argument for starting with a dialect rather than MSA. I’m not even sure how you’d go about learning Egyptian, for example, without first learning MSA, other than living with a family in Cairo.
Good luck!!!
I took a peek at Turkish a few weeks ago, not only did I recognize several words from Arabic, best of all ‘and’ is written as a separate word.
Wht abt flms? Isn’t Egpt th ldng prdcr of Arbc flms, and ths in th Egptn dlct? I’d b bmmd if I mstrd a lngg bt ws nt abl t wtch its flms. Mst of my Rssn lstnng is wth flms and Ytb vds. Mst of th lttr tht I wtch ar dfntly nt ltrry Rssn.
Mind you, I just heard that the new ruler of Saudi Arabia has repealed their government ban on cinemas, so maybe they will start making movies too? 
Gulf dialects of Arabic being (I think?) quite close to standard Arabic…
But yeah, Egyptian is very strong in movies and music.
As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s a conundrum - if you want to read any serious literature, newspapers, etc, or to watch most Arabic TV news, then MSA is going to be a strong choice.
I suppose the real gung-ho approach would be to learn both MSA and Egyptian colloquial! (It’d be kind of like learning Spanish and Italian together, I guess.)
EDIT
MSM changed to MSA (That was an interesting Freudian slip perhaps?!)
MSM = ?