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Alef &noon

The document provides an introduction to two Arabic letters - "alef" (‫ )ا‬and "nun" (‫.)ن‬ It discusses how alef is pronounced like the English letter 'A' and is written as a vertical stick. It then introduces the four possible forms (isolated, initial, medial, final) that Arabic letters can take and provides examples of nun in each form. The document concludes by having the learner write the Arabic word for "I" (‫.)أنا‬

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76 views3 pages

Alef &noon

The document provides an introduction to two Arabic letters - "alef" (‫ )ا‬and "nun" (‫.)ن‬ It discusses how alef is pronounced like the English letter 'A' and is written as a vertical stick. It then introduces the four possible forms (isolated, initial, medial, final) that Arabic letters can take and provides examples of nun in each form. The document concludes by having the learner write the Arabic word for "I" (‫.)أنا‬

Uploaded by

olta
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Alef and Nun

The Arabic alphabet contains 28 letters and their variations.

Arabic is largely phonetic. This means words are pronounced exactly like they’re written.
Also, most Arabic sounds have counterparts in English.

We'll use this similarity to English to tackle the Arabic writing system. Let's separate the
letters into two types. The first type are the Arabic letters that have English counterparts,
and the second type are those that don’t. In this lesson, we’ll learn 2 letters “ I”and “‫ ”ن‬.
Both of them belong to the first type, so expect them to be really easy to pronounce!

Ready? Let's begin!

"
We'll start with: )‫(الف‬ "‫ا‬
So what sound does this letter make? That’s easy. It’s just like its English counterpart “A”
in the word “apple”.

"‫"ا‬

is very easy to write. It’s basically a vertical stick ‫))ا‬

Arabic is a cursive language. That means every letter in a word connects to the letter
before or after it. So every time I introduce a new letter in this series, I'll also show you
how it’s written in all its possible positions.

Let’s get to know the different possible positions for a letter in Arabic. It’s always one of
four: Isolated, initial, medial, or final.

Let’s look at each of them.


Isolated means that the letter has no letters before it or after it. It’s the standard form we
learned just a few minutes ago.

Initial means the the letter lies in the beginning of a word, so it’s connected to the letter
after it, but has no letters before it.

Medial means that the letter is connected from back and front to other letters.

And final means that the letter is the last letter in a word, so it’s only connected to the letter
before it.

With the exception of six letters, we must learn the four possible forms for all the letters in
the Arabic alphabet. Those six exception letters) don't have a distinct medial form and are
instead written with their final form without being connected to the next letter. Their initial
form is the same as the isolated form.

By the way, the letter we learned today happens to be one of those exceptions! That
means we only have to learn two forms, isolated and final. You already learned the
isolated version, so you just need to learn the final version.

Let’s write it.

‫نا‬

Now we will learn the final letter needed to write the word “I” in Arabic. That’s “‫”ن‬.

The “‫ “ ن‬is pronounced just like the English “N”.

It basically looks like a semi-circle with a dot on top.

Remember that this is the isolated form.

Let’s write it!


‫ن‬

‫ ن‬requires that you learn all four forms. Let’s get them all out of the way at once!

So we have the initial form for when ‫ ن‬appears at the beginning of a word, the medial form
for when it appears in the middle of a word, and the final form for when it’s at the end.

Now try to write all three!

‫نا‬

‫لنا‬

‫من‬

Great! You've already learned two letters of the Arabic alphabet! I think you're ready to
learn another Arabic word!

The word you'll learn to write today is a'na.

This word means “I”. The first ‫ أ‬is isolated because it’s at the beginning of the word. The
second and the third letters ‫ ن‬and ‫ ا‬are connected. You may have noticed that the ‫ ا‬at the
beginning has a little mark on the top. When alef is at the beginning of the word, we add
this mark to it but it is still the alef sound. There's an exception to this rule, but you can
read about it in the lesson notes and we'll talk more about this mark in a later lesson so
don't worry too much!

Now try to write it yourself!

‫أنا‬

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