Arabic Alphabet

Summary: Learnt the Arabic alphabet which contains 28 letters and Arabic is written from right to left.

Here they are (courtesy of Wikipedia) along with their names:

ا ʾAlif, ب Bāʾ, ت Tāʾ, ث Ṯāʾ, ج Ǧīm, ح Ḥā, خ Ḫāʾ, د Dāl, ذ Ḏāl, ر Rāʼ, ز Zayn, س Sīn, ش Šīn, ص Ṣād, ض Ḍād, ط Ṭāʾ, ظ Ẓāʾ, ع ʿAyn, غ Ġain, ف Fāʾ, ق Qāf, ك Kāf, ل Lām, م Mīm, ن Nūn, ه Hāʾ, و Wāw, ي Yāʾ.


First impressions are that they are so beautiful! A bonus is that they are designed for joined up writing!

A few bonus notes:

• Each letter in Arabic has a name (how cute is that!) so those are NOT their pronunciations.
• The letters can look different in a word than they do stand alone. (sometimes they like to dress up :p).
• A few of the sounds don't exist at all in English - so we'll be learning something truly "new"
• In Arabic writing you mostly write just the Consonants - Vowels are only there when you read it or speak it!
• Some of the letters look different depending on the font.
  

Plan for study

• Put the letters into Anki with all their variant forms, with sound files (anybody know where I can get these from? found.) and learn.
  
• When I learn them write them out by hand to get used to their feel and shape and to improve memory. (I have a geeky plain white writing book that I write everything I learn down by hand too for this purpose)
• Move onwards and upwords onto words, phrases and sentences!