Things You'll Need:
- Text book on the Arabic alphabet
- Printed material in Arabic
- Arabic handwriting examples
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Step 1
Understand the basics of the Arabic alphabet. Learning some essential facts about the Arabic writing system can prevent confusion down the road. The Arabic alphabet is written from right to left and always in cursive. There's no print form or upper case. There are only 28 letters (Farsi and Urdu have a few more), but most letters have four shape variants. The variants are called isolated, initial, medial and final, referring to where the letter is in the word. Arabic is a consonant alphabet, which means there are some vowel sounds without letters to represent them.
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Step 2
Study one set of letters at a time. Trying to learn the whole Arabic alphabet at once can be overwhelming. Some Arabic letters look very similar to others and they're easy to confuse if you try to learn them at the same time. Because of this, you'll probably learn faster if you study just two or three letters a day. Learn the correct direction of pen strokes to write each letter and practice by writing all the variants of the letter. It's also vital to learn the sound of each letter, since some Arabic sounds don't exist in English.
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Step 3
Get to know the vowel signs. Arabic has letters only for the long vowels a, i and u. Short vowels can be shown using marks above or below the letters. These marks are usually used in religious texts and text books for children and students of Arabic, but they're sometimes used in ordinary texts to avoid confusion. Vowel marks will show you how to pronounce new Arabic words in your text book.
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Step 4
Practice writing Arabic to learn how to connect the letters. Arabic letters are always written in cursive form, which means most letters are connected to each other. There are 22 Arabic letters with four variants. These letters are connected to letters before and after them. The other six Arabic letters have only two variants and are not connected to letters that come after them in the word. Letters in their connected forms can look quite different from how they look alone. Even though you've learned all the forms of each letter, it still takes some practice to write words correctly.
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Step 5
Learn to read the Arabic alphabet. As you were learning to write Arabic letters, you probably read a few short words, but you'll need more practice to read fluently. Start off with text book readings so know if you're pronouncing and understanding the words correctly. You'll also need some examples of ordinary Arabic handwriting, which can be messier and harder to read that the neatly formed letters in books.
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Step 6
Take dictations. Taking dictation not only helps you increase your Arabic writing speed, but it also improves your ability to hear Arabic sounds that don't exist in English. Ask a native or near-native Arabic speaker to pronounce words for you to write down. They can then check if you heard the sounds correctly and have used the right forms of the letters to spell the word.
