Hey, 

here's another good article on the topic, especially the presumed educational benefits for Arabic-speaking children who watch cartoons in MSA: 

http://lughat.blogspot.de/2014/06/standard-arabic-and-cartoons.html

This fuels my resolve to plod on in my struggle to speak and communicate in a written language. 

Thanks for posting the link! The discussion is fascinating, especially how emotional it gets :)

Very interesting article, Dorothea, thank you for it.  It is interesting to see how emotional these discussions get, and not really surprising the more you learn about how socially and (sometimes) religiously charged views about the language are.  It seems to stray into the almost-absurd sometimes (as when you have people saying, re: MSA, that most Arabic speakers can't "speak their own native language"...what a person grows up speaking is, by definition, their native language).  It's interesting, and a little disconcerting at times, to see how self-depricating some people can be about their own spoken variant...it seems like they don't see how their version of Arabic can be just as rich and poetic and beautiful.