Ukindia Learn Arabic Page

Ukindia
Learn to Read Arabic


Lesson 1


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Arabic is the language of a large part of our planet . It is the spiritual language of Islam -one of the world's major religions. It is also a permanent language of the UN.

These are a few very basic learn to read the alphabet lessons. You may freely copy these lessons for non commercial uses . The words are mostly in English so you can more easily recognise the shape of the letters.Write to us to let us know if you find the lessons useful and if you spot any mistakes.

Arabic is written in the opposite direction from English ie from your Right to Left. In the figure below are two letters sh as in shame and n as in no - read from right to left to get used to it- the nearest hindi equivalent is given as well.


Each letter is written in four forms . For eg if Sh comes in the beginning of a word it is written as

If in the middle as in


If at the end as


and if on its own , in a detached form


From the figure below one can see that it is easy to spot the four forms of each letter. The detached form and final form look very similar . The inital and medial ones have the final bit of a letter left out . Arabic has its own built in shorthand !

These are the four forms of Sh and N marked detached , initial , medial and final.

Supposing we wanted to make a word beginning with Sh and ending with N ( eg to shun somebody) we take initial form of Sh and final form of N to make shn

Now follows the whole Arabic alphabet with the closest English equivalent .

Note that in the figure above (which has the equivalent Hindi sound added ) some sounds share a common letter. For example B and P are the same , although in some Arab countries three dots are present under B to make it P.

Revise the alphabet again

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