The Arabic Alphabet: How to Read & Write It
by Nicholas Awde, Putros Samano

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Book Summary Information

• ISBN13: 9780818404306
• Condition: New
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Book Reviews of The Arabic Alphabet: How to Read & Write It

Book Review: Essential teaching aid
Summary: 5 Stars

In this book Awde has produced along with co-author Samano another excellent language book. Anyone intending to learn a new language like Arabic must first clear the hurdle of learning a new alphabet, and I think anyone using any of the recent books to teach themselves Arabic should probably get this book, too, as their discussions aren't nearly as clear or as detailed as what you'll find here.

I'd previously learned the Cyrillic alphabet to learn Russian, so I'm no stranger to foreign alphabets, but Arabic is even more difficult in that at least many of the letters in Russian are the same as in English, although some are different, and some are the same but have a different sound, which is confusing initially. For example, the Russian letter "P" is prounounced like "r," the backwards letter "N" is actually an "i," the "y" is pronounced like "u," and the backwards letter R is is prounounced like "ya"). But Arabic is completely different so there's' no resemblance, so you have to learn everything from scratch.

So far I've checked out at least a half dozen books on teaching yourself Arabic, trying to figure out which one I'll buy after reading this book, and although each one has an introductory chapter on the alphabet and script, this book goes into considerably more detail than they can in one chapter and discusses many more concepts and details. The book is almost 100 pages long, and this is much longer than what your typical Arabic language text has space for in the section on the alphabet or script.

For example, one of the main difficulties of Arabic is that the letters change their form depending on whether they're at the beginning, middle, or end of a word. The authors go over this in detail as well as other difficulties, such as the hamzah, or diacritical marks that can appear over various consonants. The hamzah has the most complicated rules of any aspect of the Arabic script, and most native Arabic speakers don't even know all of them because there are so many. In that sense it's like the English apostrophe, which can float around a sentence like the Hamzah, and which confuses both English language speakers as well as students of English.

In addition to the above, the authors discuss many more difficulties and concepts which will aid you in learning Arabic, whichever text you're working from. Overall, this is almost an essential supplement to any other Arabic book, especially for anyone trying to learn Arabic through self-study.

Summary of The Arabic Alphabet: How to Read & Write It

Literature & Fiction Books

• Subjects > Literature & Fiction
• Education & Reference > Foreign Languages > Instruction > Arabic