Arabic Alphabet: The Guide to Learning the Arabic Letters and Script

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There are various methods to learn the Arabic alphabet, which has 28 letters. You’ll find all of them in the table below, with their basic sounds and a memory trick for each one.

Most print courses give you a table of Arabic letters and then expect you to continue with the next lesson once you’ve memorised the letters. This brute-force memorisation method can be slightly improved if you use a spaced repetition flashcard system like Anki in order to study the letters one by one and review them at good intervals, but you’d still brutalise your brain to try to shove the Arabic letters in there.

In the end, even with perfect recall of the flashcards, you’d still be at risk of confusing the letters or simply not being able to string them together to read actual Arabic words. This blog post will try to answer the question of how you could learn the alphabet more intelligently and with less effort.

I’ll state right away that I’m not impartial, given that I have authored the book Arabic Script Hacking (and equivalent books for other alphabets) and I’d be happy for you to buy it. However, I am going to share a lot of tips that you can apply with or without the book.

A note from the Fluent in 3 Months team before we get started: You can chat away with a native speaker for at least 15 minutes with the “Fluent in 3 Months” method. All it takes is 90 days. Tap this link to find out more.

1. Remembering the Basic Letters in the Arabic Alphabet

Mnemonics aren’t only useful for Arabic. Benny uses the same approach with other scripts, as he showed in this Thai example, and you can follow him at @languagehacking for more language-learning tips:

Problem: In Arabic, a lot of letters look similar to other letters, differing only by the number and position of dots. If you rely on rote memorisation only, you’ll inevitably confuse those similar letters.

Solution: Take advantage of the similarity! The Arabic alphabet is already grouped by similar shapes, so if you can find a mnemonic (a trick) that helps you remember the differences, you only need to learn very few distinct shapes.

For example, the Arabic equivalent of the letter T (ت) and the letter TH (ث) only differ by the number of dots. T has two dots and TH has three. This is perfect because the numbers two and three also start with T and TH respectively.

My suggestions for remembering the basic shapes:

One quick note before you read the table: Arabic has several pairs of letters that sound roughly the same to an English ear, but one is heavier and pronounced further back in the throat. I’ve used a capital letter for each heavier sound in the transliteration column, so ت is t while ط is T, and ح is H while ه is h. The capital is your reminder that the sound isn’t the English one you might expect.

You’ll also meet three shapes very early that aren’t counted among the 28: ة (taa marbuuta, which sits at the end of most feminine words), ء (hamza, a glottal stop like the little catch in the middle of “uh-oh”), and لا (laam and alif joined into a single shape). They’re worth recognising now, so they don’t throw you the first time you open real Arabic text.

2. Recognising the Initial, Medial and Final Shapes of Arabic Letters

It isn't enough to study only the isolated letters listed above because Arabic is a cursive script: letters within a word connect whenever their joining properties allow it. Some letters don't connect to the following letter, and letters can therefore appear in isolated as well as connected forms.

So apart from the isolated shapes above, you’ll have to recognise the joining forms a letter can take: initial when joined only to the following letter, medial when joined on both sides, and final when joined only to the preceding letter. Not every letter has all four forms.

Before you complain: this is not too different from English. Consider that the capital letter A, which is used at the beginning of sentences, is also a different shape from the lower-case letter a. Many people in fact write “a” as “ɑ”, so that’s already three shapes one has to learn for the letter A, not counting cursive.

Problem: Arabic textbooks show you the different shapes that each letter will take, but they usually lack exercises. As long as your understanding remains theoretical, you will struggle with the Arabic alphabet.

Solution: In order to activate this knowledge of letter shapes, I recommend taking actual Arabic texts and not trying to read/understand them but just trying to find the letter. Counting how often the letter occurs in a text is an excellent way to train yourself to perceive Arabic differently.

3. Being Able to Pronounce Arabic

Problem: There are many Arabic letters whose pronunciation is unfamiliar and tricky.

Solution: First of all, I’d never buy any beginner-level course that doesn’t include recordings of real speakers, because that’s the pronunciation I want to learn from.

Pronunciation is crucial to get right. But if you are stuck on the sound of a particular letter, you can find hundreds of audio examples at www.forvo.com.

There’s also a particular trick that linguists employ. That is to compare the pronunciation of two words that differ in only one letter, for example the English words bin and pin, in order to be able to zoom in on the difference.

4. Writing in Arabic Script

No matter how often you look at Arabic letters, you will find it very difficult to remember them unless you build a visceral relationship with the letters.

The easiest way to do so is to start meticulously copying Arabic by hand (remember to write right-to-left!). It’s this way that you’ll notice a lot of details that escape you by simply looking at the letters.

I recommend buying a set of writing exercise books for first graders, with multiple lines, which will help you match the relative size and bend of each letter part.

5. Developing Reading Fluency

A few weeks into learning Arabic, Benny filmed his first attempt to read it out loud, and it gives you a fair idea of what this stage actually sounds like:

In order to become as fluent reading Arabic letters as English letters, there is no way around lots of practice. However, as a beginner with a limited vocabulary, there is not much you can practise with.

If you keep reading your textbook dialogues, you will start to remember them, with barely a token effort to recognise and read the letters. There is also the danger that you may persistently misread words, because as a beginner you don’t know if something should read kama or kana, katab or kathab, or similar.

Solution: Practise with words that should be familiar, such as country names, city names, personal names, words that Arabic borrowed from English, words that English borrowed from Arabic, and so on.

There are a lot of these words – several hundred, maybe a thousand – so that you don’t easily run out of easy practice material, and at the same time you have an in-built self-correction system which makes you go “Wait a minute!” if you accidentally read Berlin as Bezlin.

To find suitable words, check the Arabic version of Wikipedia or google “Arabic words in English” or the like.

6. The Short Vowels You Won’t See

Short vowels usually aren’t written at all, which catches out nearly everyone learning to read Arabic. The 28 letters above cover the consonants and long vowels, and in a newspaper, novel or road sign, that’s all you get.

Short vowels do have their own small marks above and below the letters, called harakat: fatha for a short a, kasra for a short i, damma for a short u, and sukuun to show that a letter carries no vowel. You’ll see these marks in children’s books, the Qur’an, dictionaries and beginner textbooks, but almost everywhere else they’re left out and the reader is expected to supply them.

This is the kama or kana problem from the last section. In practice, it’s less of a barrier than it sounds, because as your vocabulary grows, you start recognising a word from its consonant skeleton, much as you can read “ths sntnc” in English without slowing down. Reading Arabic and knowing Arabic words grow together, so don’t expect to sound out a word you’ve never met before.

7. Combining Everything

When I was learning Arabic, I despaired with the available materials. Most of the language “courses” make zero effort to teach the alphabet. They really expect you to look at a table of letters and somehow cram it all into your brain.

So once I was further along, I set out to create an Arabic alphabet course that combines all these insights that I wish I would have had when starting out – the same insights that I outlined in this blog post.

My course introduces letters one by one, with mnemonics and references to similarities, with audio, with hundreds of cognates for your fluency practice, with space for writing and with letter search exercises for your recognition of different shapes.

You can assemble all this yourself from various sources on the internet based on the tips I gave above. But if you want to save those hours and spend them actually learning the language, or if you want to take advantage of the unique algorithm that ensures you’re learning the letters in an optimal order and with maximum opportunities for practice, I would be very happy if you bought the book, Arabic Script Hacking by Judith Meyer.

Once the letters stop feeling like a puzzle, the fun part is using them. Our guides to common Arabic phrases and the most useful Arabic words show the script alongside the transliteration, so both give you extra reading practice, while our guide to learning Arabic covers where to go next. If you’d like native-speaker audio to go with the letters, you can sign up for ArabicPod101 and get hours of it, while our ArabicPod101 review explains what you actually get.

When you’d rather be speaking Arabic as well as reading it, the Fluent in 3 Months Bootcamp is built for that: 90 days to a 15-minute conversation with a native speaker.