Do you speak arabic

I am a novice font designer and want to design non latin fonts at some point or the other. I was wondering if you guys who design Arabic typefaces actually speak/understand Arabic( stupid question?). To put it in a better way, should I learn Arabic to typeset it? I did try searching this forum but i can not go back to previous discussion pages(forum is broken? The links are not loading).
If it's still not clear , i am talking about John Hudson(http://typophile.com/user/1262)