Arabic Alphabet

Now examine the table below

As you may have noticed, some of the letters in Arabic don’t exist in English and vice versa. We will first go through the letters that exist in English, the table below shows the letters that you may not have any problem learning or pronouncing:

Now we will go through the Arabic letters that are either hard to pronounce or are pronounced a little bit differently, you shouldn’t worry if you can’t pronounce them the right way, because there are always close pronunciations in Arabic, and you still can be understood.

Reading Arabic:

Now that you know how to pronounce the Arabic letters, we will go through reading them, Arabic letters should be written connected to each other, you can simply think of it as if you’re writing in cursive in English, like in the example below you can see how the first WELCOME is written, then the second WELCOME which has all letters connected to each other, Unlike English, Arabic in most cases cannot be written with its letters separated from each other like the way we wrote the word WELCOME. Most letters should be connected like the way the second Welcome is written. There are some exceptions which we will go through in this lesson.

To read Arabic you should know that the Arabic alphabet letters have up to 3 forms, each letter takes a form depending on its position in the word, look at the example below and you will notice that a letter has a form at the beginning of the word, in the middle of the word and at the end of the word, some letters however can keep the same form in one or two positions. Compare the m in the two examples below, the M of come has a longer tail than the M of the room because of the position of m, the same thing happens in Arabic. The form that a letter takes depends on its position in a given word, and the difference most of the time is very small, like a longer tail to allow it connect with another letter following it.

The table below shows the three forms that a letter can take, a letter in a blue font shows a letter starting a word, the red font shows a letter in the middle of the word, and the black font shows a letter at the end of the word, as you may have noticed, there is no big different between the three forms.

Just a tip for you: most of the time the letter at the end looks exactly like the letter when it’s alone.

Arabic Alphabet List:

**: letters having stars next to them can only connect with other letters placed before them and not after, which means that if a letter is placed after them, that letter should take a form as if it was placed in the beginning of the word.

Note also that the letters I marked with stars in the table above never connect with other letters marked with stars either before or after.

So you have to be careful with these starred letters, because sometimes they may make you think that they’re the last letter of a word because they have that form of an ending letter, while in the reality they may not be the last letter of the word. The table below may explain it better:

Learning how to read Arabic characters and how to pronounce it will make it very easy for you to learn the language, and avoid counting on transliterations that are not really reliable.

Arabic Vowels

Short Vowels in Arabic:

In Arabic short vowels are not a part of the Arabic alphabet, instead they are written as marks over or below the consonant and sometimes over or below a long vowel. To make it easy we will take an example in English: the word Canada is written as CNDA but using Arabic Alphabet, the vowel A between C and N and between N and D are omitted, instead they’re replaced by small symbols, especially because they’re only short vowels, you see the little dashes on the top of C and on the top of N in the image below, they’re called FATHA in Arabic, meaning the short vowel “A” in English, so instead of writing a word full of vowels in Arabic, we only write the FATHA on the top of a consonant to indicate a short vowel “A”, and also we have symbols referring to short vowel “E” or “I” , and also a symbol for short vowel “O” , actually this is a good idea, because it’s saving space and also has an other advantage that we will see later. You may have noticed that the consonant D and the vowel A don’t have any symbols on the top of them in the image below, that’s because the “A” at the end is considered a long vowel in this word, so it’s the vowel of “D”, no need to add another vowel on the top of “D” since the long vowel “A” is already helping us pronounce the word the right way. Now you can look at the word Canada in Arabic; you will see that it has the exact symbols as the word CNDA.

The table below shows other types of symbols referring to Arabic short vowels. First we see Washington the way it’s written in English, and then we can see it using English Alphabet but Arabic symbols of short vowels. And finally you can see the word in Arabic with its full short vowels.

“WA” as you noticed doesn’t need a symbol, because the “W” is followed by a long vowel “A”, “SH” is not followed by a vowel, which means that we need to add a short vowel referring to “i”, and indeed we added one already, it’s the tick below the “SH” which is called KASRAH, you can also see it marked as (#3). The “N” has a small circle on the top of it, that symbol is called SUKOUN (marked as # 4 in the table below) referring to a consonant without a vowel, So any time we have a consonant that doesn’t have a vowel, we just add that small circle on the top, note that the SUKOUN should always be placed on the top and never below a consonant. So we used the Sukoun in this word because we didn’t say NA NO NI but we just said N. Now let’s look at the T, it has a little symbol which looks like comma on the top of the letter, that symbol is called DAMMAH (# 2 in the table above) referring to a short vowel “O” , so when we add DAMMAH to the letter “T”, we will get “TO”, easy, isn’t it! And finally as we have seen before, the final N has another SUKOUN meaning that the N is without a Vowel, and should be pronounced N full stop.

Let’s review what we just went through.

1 = FATHA = Short Vowel “A”

2 = DAMMAH = Short Vowel “O” or “U”

3 = KASRAH = Short Vowel “I” or “E”

4 = SUKOUN = Used for consonants lacking a vowel after them.

5= FATHATAIN= double FATHA (FATHA on the top of another FATHA)= FATHA + N= the short vowel “A”+ N: Ghadan = غداً = Tomorrow

6= KASRATAIN= double KASRAH (KASRAH on the top of another KASRAH)= KASRAH+ N= the short vowel “i” or “e”+ N: Kuratin= كرةٍ =a ball

7= DAMMATAIN= double DAMMAH (DAMMAH next to another DAMMAH)= DAMMAH+ N= the short vowel “o” or “u”+ N: Kitabun= كتابٌ= a book

Note that # 5, 6, 7 are not used as much as 1-4, also note that # 5, 6, 7 are only used at the end of a word

Long Vowels in Arabic:

The table below shows the long vowels in Arabic, they’re considered long vowels because of the stress they put on a given vowel, same thing exists in English, the word “exceed” should be stressed in the vowels “ee” or “loose” the stress in the “oo”, note that these long vowels are also considered some sort of consonants ( their pronunciation as a consonant can be found on the page” ARABIC ALPHABET”.

There is also the SHADDAH, it’s the symbol marked as number 1 on the image below, used when we have a double consonant, like instead of writing the proper name (ANNA with double “N”, we only write it with one N and add SHADDAH on the top of N, the example # 2 shows how the SHADDAH placed on the top of the letter T in Arabic, the transliteration of the word is QATTA’A which mean the verb “to cut” in Arabic it’s written QATA’A and instead of writing double T, the word has only one T and a SHADAH on the top of it.

Example # 3 shows a little symbol on the top of the ALIF which looks like the Latin ~, it’s called MAD, and mostly used on the top of ALIF to express a long “A” something like “AA”, the word shown in example # 4 is AAB, it means the month of August, but the MAD is not used that often, so you will come across it but rarely.

Finally, This may surprise you but short vowels in Arabic are not used that often, you may come across them if two words look the same and the writer wants you to distinguish between them so that they won’t be confused, the person would than add only the vowel which doesn’t exist in the other word, but other than that sometimes you can read a whole text without coming across any short vowel. The reason is that in Arabic most words are distinctive without short vowels; I will give you an example in English in the Image below:

It doesn’t take that much thinking to know what do these words mean, I omitted 2 vowels from Canada for example, and two vowels from the word Computer ... that’s how reading Arabic works. Sometimes we have to add a vowel because it’s a long vowel and not a short one like the “a” in Cnda.

Below is an example of how the verb “to write” is written in Arabic, it’s written كتب which is equal to “ktb” in Latin alphabet, but we don’t read it like “ktb” but as “kataba”, as you have noticed 3 vowels are added when you pronounce it, but when you write it, only the consonants are enough to give us an idea about the word. Writing only one verb in Arabic alphabet without short vowels saved you the time to write 3 vowels, imagine how much it could save you when you write a text…

In short, short vowels that are presented as symbols are not important to read Arabic, but they make it easy to read for beginner and also to avoid confusion between two similar looking words.

Try to master these Arabic vowels as they’re very important for beginners.

Arabic Numbers

The table below shows examples of Arabic numbers. The first and the fifth columns have numbers used in some Arab countries; they’re not of Arabic origins but still used in many places especially copies of the Holy Qur’an …. Nowadays what we call the Arabic numbers are the numbers shown on the columns 2 and 6, which are used by the Arab world as well as the rest of the world.

Arabic Numbers
٠	0	sifr	صفر	١	1	wahid	واحد
٢	2	ithnan	إثنان	٣	3	thalatha (th as in bath)	ثلاثة
٤	4	arba’a	أربعة	٥	5	khamsa	خمسة
٦	6	sitta	ستة	٧	7	sab’a	سبعة
٨	8	thamaniya (th in thin)	ثمانية	٩	9	tis’a	تسعة
١٠	10	‘ashra	عشرة	١١	11	ahada ‘ashar	إحدى عشر
١٢	12	ithna ‘ashar	إثنا عشر	١٣	13	thalatha ‘ashar	ثلاثة عشر
١٤	14	arba’a ‘ashar	أربعة عشر	١٥	15	khamsa ‘ashar	خمسة عشر
١٦	16	sitta ‘ashar	ستة عشر	١٧	17	sab’a ‘ashar	سبعة عشر
١٨	18	thamaniya ‘ashar	ثمانية عشر	١٩	19	tis’a ‘ashar	تسعة عشر
٢٠	20	‘ishrun	عشرون	٢١	21	wahed wa-’ishrun	واحد و عشرون
٢٢	22	ithnane wa-’ishrun	إثنان وعشرون	٢٣	23	thalatha wa-’ishrun	ثلاثة و عشرون
٢٤	24	arba’a wa-’ishrun	أربعة و عشرون	٢٥	25	khamsa wa-’ishrun	خمسة و عشرون
٢٦	26	sitta wa-’ishrun	ستة و عشرون	٢٧	27	sab’a wa-’ishrun	سبعة وعشرون
٢٨	28	thamaniya wa-’ishrun	ثمانية و عشرون	٢٩	29	tis’a wa-’ishrun	تسعة و عشرون
٣٠	30	thalathun	ثلاثون	٣١	31	wahid wa-thalathun	واحد و ثلاثون
٤٠	40	arba’un	أربعون	٤٢	42	ithnan wa-arba’un	إثنان و أربعون
٥٠	50	khamsun	خمسون	٥٣	53	thalatha wa-khamsun	ثلاثة و خمسون
٦٠	60	sittun	ستون	٦٤	64	arba'a wa-sittun	أربعة و ستون
٧٠	70	sab’un	سبعون	٧٥	75	khamsa wa-sab’un	خمسة و سبعون
٨٠	80	thamanun	ثمانون	٨٦	86	sitta wa-thamanun	ستة و ثمانون
٩٠	90	tis’un	تسعون	٩٧	97	sab'a wa-tis’un	سبعة و تسعون
١٠٠	100	mi'a	مائة	١٠٠٠	1000	alf	ألف
١٠٠٠٠٠	100000	mi'at alf	مائة ألف	٢٠٠٠	2000	alfain	ألفين
١٠٠٠٠٠٠٠	10000000	Million	مليون

Forming numbers in Arabic is quite easy, from 13 to 19 you just place a number before ten for example 13 = three ten, instead of thirteen in English, 17 is seven ten in Arabic. From 21 to 99 you just need to reverse the numbers and add (wa- between the two numbers) 36 would be six wa- thirty instead of thirty six (sitta wa-thalathun), (wa means and).

0 is sifr in Arabic, from which the word cipher came. For 11 and 12 they’re irregular, so just remember how to write them by now (11 = ehda ‘ashar, 12 = ithna ‘ashar).

So in general, numbers standing alone are easy to use, or say. The hard part is that numbers 3 to 10 have a unique rule of agreement with nouns known as polarity: A numeral in masculine gender should agree with a feminine referrer and vice versa (thalathatu awlaad = three boys), boys are masculine plural, so the feminine form of number 3 should be used (which is thalathatu, and not thalathu which is the masculine form, the u at the end of numbers is used when a number is followed by another word to make an easy jump to the next word) (thalathu banaat = three girls) banaat = girls, which is feminine plural, therefore a masculine form of number 3 should be used (thalathu). That may sound complicated but once you get used to it, it will not be as hard as it seems now, besides most Arab natives make mistakes or simply don’t care about matching the gender and the number.