The Arabic alphabet

Arabic is written right to left with an alphabet of 28 letters that is, strictly speaking, an abjad: consonants and long vowels are written, while short vowels are understood or marked with small signs that ordinary texts leave out. It is the script of the Quran and of more than twenty countries, and, with adaptations, of Persian, Urdu and Pashto too.

Its most striking feature is that the letters join: each one changes shape depending on whether it stands alone, at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a word. They are four faces of the same sign, almost always with the same skeleton and the same dots, and six letters — ا د ذ ر ز و — only join the letter before them, so they barely have two. Learning the alphabet means learning to recognise the letter under any of its forms.

Many letters differ from each other only by their dots: ب ت ث share the same stroke and only the number and position of the dots change. That is why Phabetia presents them in families of similar shape and practises them in all four positions, and why reading words here transcribes what is written: the consonants and the long vowels.

The 31 signs of the Arabic alphabet

Words to practise

• كتاب ktab
• سلام slam
• صباح ṣbaḥ
• طريق ṭryq
• هلال hlal
• مدرسة mdrsat
• سيارة syarat
• مستشفى mstshfá
• موسيقى mwsyqá
• نبات nbat
• ثابت thabt
• خيمة khymat

How you learn it in Phabetia

Every new letter is introduced first with its name and its Latin equivalent, and you have to recognise it before you start practising it. Then come the exercises: letter to sound, sound to letter, quick memory, telling it apart from the Latin letter it resembles, spotting the intruder, completing a word and reading one.

Characters arrive two or three at a time and are never dropped: each level carries the previous ones along. What you get wrong comes back sooner and more often; what you have mastered shows up rarely, and anything you have not seen for days climbs back up on its own.

There are no lives and no punishment: getting one wrong interrupts nothing. To move on you only need 70 % right.

Frequently asked questions

How many letters does the Arabic alphabet have?

Twenty-eight. Here we add three signs that appear in any text: ta marbuta (ة), alif maqsura (ى) and hamza (ء).

Why does each letter have four forms?

Because letters join one another within a word, and the shape changes depending on whether the letter stands alone, at the beginning, in the middle or at the end. Six letters do not join the next one, which is why they only have an isolated and a final form.

Is there uppercase?

No. Arabic has no distinction between uppercase and lowercase; what changes is the letter's position in the word.

Are vowels written?

Long ones are, with ا و ي. Short ones are marked with signs above or below the letter, which ordinary texts omit; that is why the words in the exercises are transcribed with the letters actually written.

Other alphabets

• Greek
• Cyrillic
• Russian
• Ukrainian
• Bulgarian
• Serbian
• Runic
• Georgian
• Armenian