Thank you so much in advance! :)
It depends on your purpose to learn Arabic.
It's true that Modern Standard Arabic is not spoken or used in our daily life (to be honest, I hate this fact a lot) however, it's used in official events, speeches, news, articles or books.<o:p></o:p>
If you want to learn it to communicate with people, then it's better to learn a dialect.The Egyptian dialect is understandable by all Arabs. As an Egyptian, I can understand the Shami dialect and Gulf easily, but the most difficult dialects for me to understand are Tunisian, Moroccan and Algerian, specially The Moroccan one (I’m actually planning to learn their dialects, because I find them really interesting for me) If you’re going to learn a dialect, choose the one you find yourself interested in and like the culture of its people.
if you would like to understand Arabic media, to read Arabic literature (any Arabic country) and write well you should definitely learn MSA. Because all of them are in MSA. Also if you speak MSA, all Arabic people could understand you even if they will speak with you their own dialect.
Coming to dialects it's true that Egyptian dialect is understandable by many other Arabic people because of the popularity of Egyptian films.
But the best thing, I think, is to learn MSA very well after that you should choose one dialect and work on it.
with MSA + one dialect, you can communicate with all Arabic world (almost) and even people that you don't understand could adapt their language for you, also you will find it easy to learn any new dialect: just with learning it for a short time.
As a Tunisian I can understand Libyan very easily and Algerian, also Moroccan with making effort.
I can understand Egyptian and Shami because I'm used to hear them so much. And I find hard time in Gulf dialects ( but I didn't hear them so much: I can understand them if I listen to them more)
