Learning The Arabic Alphabet – Most printed courses give you a table of Arabic letters and wait until you’ve memorized them before moving on to the next lesson. This brute force memorization method can be improved a bit by using a spaced repetition flashcard system like Anki to learn the letters one by one and review them at regular intervals, but you will still be brutalizing your brain to push the Arabic language. give letters there.
After all, even with a perfect memory of flash cards, you still run the risk of confusing letters or simply not being able to put them together to read real Arabic words. This blog post will try to answer the question of how to learn the alphabet smarter and with less effort.
Learning The Arabic Alphabet
I’ll say right away that I’m not biased, because I’m the author of the book Hacking the Arabic script (and similar books in other alphabets) and I want you to buy it. However, I will share many tips that you can apply with or without the book.
Learn Arabic Alphabet For Kids With Resources & Materials
Problem: In the Arabic language, many letters are similar to other letters, differing only in the number and position of the dots. If you rely only on note taking, you will surely confuse these similar letters.
Solution: Use analogy! The Arabic alphabet is already grouped by similar shapes, so if you can find a mnemonic (trick) to help you remember the differences, you only need to learn a few different shapes.
For example, the Arabic equivalent of the letter T (ت) and the letter TH (ث) differ only in the number of dots. T has two points and TH has three points. This is perfect because the numbers two and three also start with T and TH respectively.
As you might expect, Ď 100% does not sound like a D, so adding a dot over the Arabic Daal also changes its pronunciation: Daal with a dot sounds like the TH in “it”.
Arabic Alphabet: The Guide To Learning The Arabic Letters And Script
Imagine Yaa as a water slide with two people going “Yaaay!” as they slide down and then fall into the water below.
Learning the letters listed above is not enough because Arabic is always written in a connected form (like the cursive you learned in school). It is not optional like English. And when letters are connected, they necessarily take different forms, usually abbreviations.
So, in addition to the letter forms mentioned above, you will need to recognize the “initial”, “middle” and “final” forms of these letters, depending on whether the letters appear at the beginning, middle or end of the word. (or according to the conditions, too complicated for this task).
Before you complain: it’s not that different from English. Imagine that the capital letter A, which is used at the beginning of the sentences, is also formed differently from the small letter a. In fact, many people write “a” as “ɑ”, so this is already learning three forms for the letter A, rather than counting cursive.
Learn The Arabic Alphabet Through The Beautiful Names Of Allah
Problem: Arabic textbooks show you different forms of each letter, but they usually lack practice. As long as your understanding remains theoretical, you will struggle with the Arabic alphabet.
Solution: To activate this knowledge of letter forms, I recommend you to take real Arabic texts and do not try to read/understand them, but try to find the letter. Counting how often a letter appears in a text is a great way to train yourself to understand Arabic.
Solution: First of all, I never buy any beginner level course that doesn’t include audio. And by that I mean a human voice, not a computer voice (looking at you, Duolingo!), because I don’t want to sound like a robot.
Pronunciation is important to getting it right. But if you’re stuck on a particular letter sound, you can find hundreds of audio examples at www.forvo.com.
Free Download] I Spy My Arabic Alphabet
There is also a trick used by linguists. That is, comparing the pronunciation of two words that differ by only one letter, such as English words
No matter how many times you look at Arabic letters, you will have trouble remembering them unless you develop a visceral relationship with the letters.
The easiest way to do this is to start copying the Arabic accurately by hand (don’t forget to write from right to left!). So you see a lot of detail that you’d miss just by looking at the letters.
I recommend buying a set of writing exercise books for first graders with a few lines to help you adjust the relative size and curve of each part of the letter.
How Many Letters In Arabic Alphabet?
There is no way to read Arabic letters with the same English letters without a lot of practice. However, as a beginner with a limited vocabulary, you can make do with it.
If you continue the dialogues in your textbook, you will remember them, with a certain effort to recognize and read the letters. There is also the risk that you can mispronounce words because you don’t know how to pronounce something.
Solution: Practice with words that you should be familiar with, such as country names, city names, personal names, words derived from Arabic from English, words derived from English from Arabic, etc.
There are a lot of words, several hundreds, maybe thousands, so you won’t easily run out of easy practice material, and at the same time, you’ll have a built-in auto-correction system that will make you say, “Wait.” one minute!” if you happen to read it
Learn Arabic Language Online
To find suitable words, check the Arabic version of Wikipedia or google “Arabic words in English” or similar.
When I was learning Arabic, I was disappointed with the material available. Most language “courses” make zero effort to teach the alphabet. They really expect you to look at the letter table and fill everything in your head.
So, once again, I set out to create an Arabic alphabet course, combining all these ideas that I wanted to have when I started, the same ideas that I described in this blog post.
My course introduces letters one by one with mnemonics and references to similes, with audio, with hundreds of associations for your mental practice, with space for writing and letter search exercises to help you recognize different shapes.
Learn Arabic Stock Illustrations
You can collect all this yourself from various Internet sources based on the tips I gave above. But if you want to save those hours and actually spend them on learning the language, or you want to use a unique algorithm that provides you with the letters in the optimal order and the maximum opportunity to learn, it will be very happy was if you bought the book, Script Hacking Arabic by Judith Meyer.
Polyglot and coder in Berlin. Current projects: Helping people learn foreign alphabets through Script Hacking and transforming Europe through DiEM25. I started a while ago and I’m going to let the training finish for a while, which is good, but I want to start again, it will be good to review what I know, to learn some things remind myself and put the rest together. I go step by step, as if I am going through the process again, so that people can follow me if they want.
My first thought was to approach several sources for learning Arabic and only take information from them in parallel rather than with one source. I’ve found many “learn Arabic” books and courses online, and at the beginner level, many are free. My first goal was to speak the Arabic alphabet. I looked at alphabet charts and read a lot of websites along the way, trying to identify good sources of teaching materials.
Above is the first chart I found and printed, and it was generally useful, showing the individual letterforms or “capitals” and the name of each letter. I quickly turned to this second, more complete chart:
Arabic Alphabet Learning
This graphic breaks down the Arabic script and shows the different shapes of each letter. Just as European languages have capitalization as well as lowercase and italics, Arabic letters change superficially depending on whether they are at the beginning, middle, or end of a word. This chart is also complete with the IPA value of each letter as well as the common Latin script transliteration for each letter, which is very helpful. I was referring to this chart for a variety of reasons during the first few weeks of my studies!
Finally, I should add/emphasize that I have not studied these charts. I kept them as reference material that I consulted often, but I quickly moved on to finding a fun and entertaining way to learn and get to know what letters look like and sound like.
I wanted to learn easily like children, I searched for “Arabic Alphabet Song”.