READING ARABIC

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.

WELCOME  Welcome   مرحبا

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.