-
Step 1
Provide students with a copy of the complete alphabet. The letters should be clear and easy to read. A quick search of the Internet will reveal many websites that feature the Arabic alphabet and ways to learn it.
-
Step 2
Begin with the most basic form of each letter. In Arabic, letters have different shapes depending on where they appear in a word. The "stand-alone" form of the letter will be the easiest for a beginner to pick up. Help students learn the sound of each of these standard forms.
-
Step 3
Have students practice identifying the individual letters by name and sound so they can discuss them and understand how they are used. Besides the standard form, there are three other forms of each letter, used at the beginning of a word, in the middle, and at the end. Some of the shapes change dramatically by form. Standard Arabic is also a highly cursive script. The rounded shapes and squiggly lines may be hard for students to identify at first.
-
Step 4
To help students pick up the letters, have them write out letters and words. This is very important because a number of the letters are extremely similar in appearance. Some letters differ only by the addition of a dot. This would be the same as, for example, the English letter D with a dot under it being pronounced not as in "dog," but as in "bog." Students must learn these distinctions. They must also be taught the slight—to the American ear—differences in sound between the different kinds of consonants. Like other Semitic languages, Arabic has more than one version of letters, such as D and T. Words change their meaning depending on whether or not you breathe out strongly when you pronounce a letter. These sounds are also written differently.
-
Step 5
Make sure students understand the vowels in the Arabic alphabet. Again, as with other Semitic languages, these are written with the help of dots and other small notations. Vowels do not have the same significance in Arabic that they do in English or Spanish. In fact, often they are not even written. In formal Arabic the text does not include vowels because the reader knows automatically where they are supposed to go. This is because, in Arabic, vowels have a grammatical meaning. A word is really just its consonants. It is the vowels you add to it that determine the word's particular tense or conjugation. It would be like saying that "rd" means ride or rode in English. You tell by the context. With some practice, students should be able to understand and follow the Arabic alphabet and all of its rules.
