Ukindia
Learn to Read Urdu


Lesson 1


Urdu is a very popular language of the subcontinent , second only in the number of speakers to Hindi. It is the national language of Pakistan and an offical language of UP in India .
It is written in the opposite direction to English ie from right to left.
It is an easy language to write fast in , because it has a built in shorthand ! Each sound is represented by a letter . The letter is written in a slightly different form depending on where it comes in the word. Only if its on its own or at the end of the word is it written in its full form. If the letter comes at the beginning or middle of the word it is written in a shortened form. Each letter therefore has four different forms ; detached , initial , medial and final . The detached and final form form are usually very similar.

It is relatively easy to guess what the other forms are going to be from the detached form of the letter . For example lets look at the letter K and N in the first two lines in the next figure.

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Note the detached form is on the extreme right then the initial , medial and final. Supposing we wanted to make a word with an initial letter K and ending with N . We would take the intial form of K marked 2 and the final form of N marked 4 and join them together . Remember to read it R to L.

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Easy isnt it ? You might be a little puzzled by the little slanting line mark on the top of K in the left word. Its called a zabar and used to signify accent on the K . It is a bit of a superfluous mark but important to recognise it and not get confused about it. Probably best to just ignore it altogether . Remember it always comes on top of a letter which has to be sounded a bit longer. However if you see other dots or vowel marks below the letter than the zabar above changes the sound of the vowel completely as we will see later.


Vowel marks

This is a very important area so make sure you get them all right . On the top line in the figure below the third one from R to L is big aa so making the word KAAN (ear) . Its a straight vertical line. The leftmost one is little i so this is Kin(as in kinship) . Note that the i sound mark - called in urdu ZER is placed below the letter. The next line from R to L is big EE or Keen . Two dots are added to the little i - ZER- mark to make a big ee below the letter.

Then little u - KUN as in crOOk - the u mark -called PESH- is always above the letter ; next is big U -KOON as in sOOn - note you get a big fat worm like figure added to the little u mark , but this figure is on level with the letter.


Next in the figure below this is O as in cone (icecone) ; then au -KAUN (who in Urdu ) as in AUtumn . Note the difference between KOON above and KAUN below. Koon has a pesh on top while KAUN has a zabar on top. . So pesh is used in little u and big ooo while the zabar above is used in au and another mark we will see later .


Next below is ae as in cane (sugar). It is very important to note that it only differs from the big ee in that big ee has an extra zer mark with the two dots below the letter. Last of all on the line ie leftmost is CAN as in can do or CANADA or as in sAnd of the seashore.This has the zabar above together with two dots below.


Just go over the vowel marks again.

The following are the vowel marks which modify the letters.

The madd , hamza and tashdid signs are special characters we will look at in the next lesson


Sometimes the letter N when it is the final letter is written without the dot in the middle and not attached to the preceding one as in the figure next.


We will end the first lesson here . It is very important to go over this lesson again and again to make sure you have the vowels right. As a test see if you get them all in the next figure..

One important point to note is that the zabar mark and i mark called a zer are similar but the zabar is on top of a letter while zer which signifies i or ee is below.

Lesson 2