Arabic/Alphabets

Arabic 101: An Introduction to Arabic

Unit: The Arabic Alphabet

Goal

By the end of this unit, the student should be able to read, comprehend, and be able to transliterate any/all letters of the known Arabic alphabet in all forms of each letter, whether they are isolated or within larger groups of letters i.e. words and phrases.

Following along in the textbook

Part 1: Reading and Writing

Basics of Reading and Writing

For many who are taking this course, the thought of learning a new alphabet other than the roman alphabet (the one that we are using now) is very intimidating. Not only that, but writing from right to left does not sound too exciting either. Don't worry, because it's not quite so scary. While some say to be wary of using a system called transliteration ,writing letters from other alphabets into another i.e. Arabic-English, there are just as many to say that it can be a valid way to learn the Arabic language such as myself.

A note for those following in the book, we are going to be following transliteration using another system, called Qalam. We are going to do this for the purpose of simplicity and ease of learning.

Letters

All of the Arabic Alphabets

Starting off, we are going to look at the base of the Arabic language; its main letters. We are going to look first off at the isolated forms of each letter. In Arabic, each letter has 4 forms; primary, secondary, final, and isolated. So, like I said, here we go with the isolated forms to make things easy.

This chart is already in your text book at the link above, I am simply putting it into table form for use with the absence of the book.

Letter Name	Letter	Transliteration
Alif	ا	a
Baa'	ب	b
Taa'	ت	t
Thaa'	ث	th
Jeem	ج	j
Haa'	ح	h
Khaa'	خ	kh
Daal'	د	d
Dhaal	ذ	dh
Raa'	ر	r
Zaa'	ز	z
Seen	س	s
Sheen	ش	sh
Saad	ص	S
Daad	ض	D
Taa'	ط	T
Dha	ظ	Z
Ayn	ع	'
Ghain	غ	gh
Faa	ف	f
Qaaf	ق	q
Kaaf'	ك	k
Laam'	ل	l
Meem'	م	m
Noon	ن	n
Ha'	ه	h
Waaw	و	w,u
Yaa	ي	y,ee