A Fast and Effective Way to learn the Arabic Alphabet
Arabic is an eloquent, unyielding, and fascinating language. It can also be a challenging language to learn, as I’m sure anyone reading this article is already aware of. This article is for a new student to the Arabic language that is looking to learn the Arabic alphabet in a timely fashion.
The Arabic alphabet can be quite a project to learn. There are only 28 letters in the Arabic alphabet, but each letter appears in four different forms, depending on where it’s located in a word (Arabic words are written in continuous script, like English cursive).
There is the isolated form (the letter standing alone), the initial form (in the beginning of a word), the medial form (in the middle of a word), and the final form (the end of a word, or word “segment”).
The appearance of the letters and sounds of the Arabic alphabet will be unfamiliar to Latin-based language speakers, Slavic language speakers, and many others of course. The Arabic alphabet, and other similar languages require much more vocal range and capabilities than Spanish, French, or even the English language.
Arabic language students often must learn how to activate, and develop vocal cords they’d never used in their native language. This article is not about learning pronunciation, but it will go hand in hand with learning to recognize letters when one sees them or hears them.
That being said, Arabic is the fifth most widely spoken language in the world. And it is related to, and even almost mutually intelligible with other languages. There are many different Arabic languages and dialects, such as Darija (spoken in Morocco), Shami (spoken in the Near East region) and Mesopotamian (Iraqi-Arabic), as examples.
Modern Standard Arabic is used in formal, professional settings, and is typically understood across the Arab-speaking world. All of the different Arabic dialects typically use the same alphabet (the “modern standard alphabet,” if you will). Letters are pronounced differently in some dialects; and there are some signature differences, and some nuanced differences; but the letters are typically the same in appearance.
(*As opposed to languages such as Persian, Urdu, and Pashto, which use an Arabic script, and have many of the same letters, but also have additional letters, and are often not classified as Arabic, or Semitic languages).
Most Arabic teachers would recommend starting with Modern Standard Arabic. The Arabic alphabet is written, and read from right to left. Assuming the student is already acquainted and adjusting to that (which doesn’t take very long to get used to) then the next task is learning the Arabic alphabet.
If one does the math, or looks at a table of the Arabic alphabet, they will see that between 28 letters (each having four forms) that there are a total of 112 letter forms in the Arabic alphabet to learn. Some letters are identical in all forms, such as “alef,” and “waw.” Some letters are nearly identical, if not still easy to correlate. Other letters take more time, especially when it comes to pronunciation. But most Arabic letters are easy to identify intuitively; especially with practice.
Some students will learn Arabic faster than others; but all students could benefit in their language learning journey to find an effective, time-saving method to learn the Arabic alphabet.
Some online content and instructional videos advise their viewers to perform repetition exercises to learn the Arabic alphabet, and simply write and re-write each letter in each form until one memorizes the alphabet. This is referred to as “rote learning,” which has very mixed reviews as a method of learning.
I don’t believe a student could find a polyglot that would have “rote learning” on their top ten list of language learning strategies. There are much more effective strategies of learning.
The Language Learning Center of North Caroline University at Chapel Hill (for example), as well as just about any other language program one would visit, implores students to learn their new language primarily through some form of application, or interaction. They have a guide on their website (link provided below) titled “Learning Languages,” in which they say to “Look for ways to expose yourself to as much of the language you’re learning as possible,” after naming “Finding real-life sources” as the first of the University’s recommended language learning activities [1].
That’s how I learned the Arabic alphabet: through interaction and application. My method of learning the Arabic alphabet was simple. I will call it: Arabic Dictionary Letter Recognition Exercise.” It is a very easy exercise to learn and practice. And with this exercise, I was able to learn the alphabet much more quickly than if I had tried to learn each letter form through meaningless, disconnected repetition.
All Arabic-English dictionaries should have a selection of reference tables in the opening pages of the book (the alphabet, numbers, days, months, years, units of measurement, etc.). Once the student has an Arabic to English (or other language) dictionary in front of them, they can take the following steps…
1. The student will want to find, and bookmark the alphabetical table; which should illustrate each letter, and its corresponding forms in rows (isolated, initial, medial, and final).
2. The student must go through the dictionary, and pick a word (how one determines the vocabulary they learn is up to them).
3. The student should then try to recognize each letter without having to look to the reference tables, and then check the reference table to see if they recognized the letter(s) correctly.
4. The student should continue with this process with new words until they can identify each letter, in any given word in an Arabic dictionary.
One can also write the words they’re practicing if they wish, but it isn’t entirely necessary to write the letters in order to learn to recognize and identify them. Writing exercises have their place of course, but hopefully with this method, an Arabic language student can spare themselves the time of rote learning, and learn the Arabic alphabet effectively so that they move forward with their studies. And by using actual words in the Arabic language to learn letters, instead of repeating letters without context, or meaning, the student is also building vocabulary of the Arabic language from the beginning. Happy studies.
Bibliography
1.https://learningcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/learning-a-second-language/