Reading Arabic

[Amit Bolds]

Youcan read each letter with the help of its components (dots and diacritics). Diacritic signs are to be originally hidden. Most Arabic books and newspapers rarely use diacritics. Arabs depend on context and experience to know the hidden diacritics.

Therefore, each of Arabic letters has many sub-forms depending on its position (initial, medial, final, or isolated) in the word. The sub-forms of most letters are close to each other, e.g. letter equivalent to /s/:

This is the standalone form of a letter, and is used when a letter is not connected to any other Arabic letters. This form is used in case of presenting the Arabic alphabet or in the case of numbering elements like (A, B, etc.).

This form is used when a letter is connected from both sides. Please note that some Arabic letters comes in the middle of a word, but it is not connected from both sides. This is because of the 6 Arabic letters called "one side connectors".

As you likely already know, Arabic is read from right to left. However, unlike some Asian scripts, it's also read horizontally. That means that you read the entire first line of text, right to left, before you go to the next line underneath.

Reading Arabic texts is challenging, as there are some letters that look almost identical but read differently and even have different pronunciations, especially to Europeans or people from other languages families.

First angle is to learn how to read Arabic letters, but you will only master a few letters and end up having many questions. Therefore, you have to keep practicing. Second angle to tackle is to learn how to read sentences. This will help you understand the grammar. Grammar mainly breaks down the language into small parts and deals with how are parts are engaged in a sentence.

Only one of the few fields where the Arabic pronunciation is affected by accent is the stress in some few words. E.g. A word like Alǰamiʿah (the university) is pronounced in Gulf and Levantine Arabic with a clear stress on the second syllable, while in Egypt and North Africa the stress is on the penultimate syllable. Both pronunciations are correct in MSA.

Beginners can start with words and phrases. Reading Arabic for beginners is much easier than reading novels and literature, as it requires thinking about complex meanings. Reading is not just pronouncing meaningless words.

Aim to avoid common mistakes like misreading certain Arabic letters. Check you pronunciation with the help of a native Arabic speaker. Try to record or write his corrections. Remember your mistakes and try to avoid them. Avoiding these mistakes will help you progress faster.

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Reading Arabic is difficult but not impossible, so be patient and continue. Remember the names of the Arabic letters, as you may need them in the following pages. Keep reading the next pages of the expertly curated curriculum. If you find any difficulties or need any assistance, please write it in a comment below.

As a Westerner, that can be quite confusing at first. I remember the first time I was on a flight to Cairo. I saw somebody reading a book in Arabic, and it looked (to my untrained eye) quite strange. They were flipping the pages backwards!

You basically have four versions of each letter: the letter by itself, the letter when it is the first letter of a word, the letter when it is the last, and the letter when it is placed somewhere in the middle.

Now for the complicated part. Keep in mind that this largely applies to Standard Arabic. If you are learning how to read Arabic, you will probably come across tashkeel (sometimes also called harakat).

Very honestly, there are a few very important reasons why learning to read Arabic is worth your time. For one, it allows you to follow the rules of StoryLearning and read books for learning Arabic, including fun ones like short stories in Arabic.

I'm trying to read a file which contain English & Arabic characters on each line and another file which contains English & Chinese characters on each line. However the characters of the Arabic and Chinese fail to show correctly - they just appear as question marks. Any idea how I can solve this problem?

After reading the line and getting the Arabic and Chinese word I use a function to translate them by simply searching for Given Arabic Text in an ArrayList (which contain all expected words) (using indexOf(); method). Then when the word's index is found it's used to call the English word which has the same index in another Arraylist. However this search always returns false because it fails when searching the question marks instead of the Arabic and Chinese characters. So my System.out.println print shows me nulls, one for each failure to translate.

The file I'm reading has been given to me after it has been modified by another program (which I know nothing about beside it's made in VB) the program made the Arabic letters that are not appearing correctly to appear. When I checked the encoding of the file on Notepad++ it showed that it's ANSI. however when I convert it to UTF8 (which replaced the Arabic letter with other English one) and then convert it back to ANSI the Arabic become question marks!

Convenience class for reading character files. The constructors of this class assume that the default character encoding and the default byte-buffer size are appropriate. To specify these values yourself, construct an InputStreamReader on a FileInputStream.

IT is most likely Reading the information in correctly, however your output stream is probably not UTF-8, and so any character that cannot be shown in your output character set is being replaced with the '?'.

I had finished a project in which I read from a text file written with notepad.The characters in my text file are in Arabic language,and the file encoding type is UTF-8.When launching my project inside Netbeans(7.0.1) everything seemed to be ok,but when I built the project as a (.jar) file the characters where displayed in this way: .How could I solve This problem please?

Most likely you are using JVM default character encoding somewhere. If you are 100% sure your file is encoded using UTF-8, make sure you explicitly specify UTF-8 when reading as well. For example this piece of code is broken:

because it uses JVM default character encoding - which you might not have control over and apparently Netbeans uses UTF-8 while your operating system defines something different. Note that this makes FileReader class completely useless if you want your code to be portable.

Reading is unjustly maligned. Lots of students of Arabic pass through Amman, Jordan, where I'm currently based, and it's not uncommon to hear the refrain, 'I'm interested in learning how to speak, not to read and write.' This blog post is about how you should be reading, EVEN IF spoken is your ultimate goal. I hope I can convince you of this fact, and entice you with some of the ways reading will enhance your study and understanding of culture and history.

Reading is the most useful activity to help an Arabic student stuck at the intermediate level. Even if your priority is to be functionally competent in a dialect, reading is still useful because it brings holistic improvements to your language abilities as a whole. The basic approach that I outlined in my book runs as follows:

At its core, the work of increasing your vocabulary comes down to how many times you are exposed to a particular word (or words). The more you are exposed to it, and the more contexts in which this happens, the better that will be for your ability to feel comfortable with the word. For example, if you hear the word for dish in a kitchen, a cafeteria, or in a restaurant, you will remember it when you have to order a meal at a restaurant.

Being able to read is a valuable skill. Numerous studies have shown that your ability to be professionally useful in a language benefits far more from reading skills than spoken ability. Many people tend to discount reading from their skill set because they feel like it will take them too much time to learn how to read. And even though this book discusses listening and reading practices, reading is key to intermediate Arabic study. By not reading Arabic you are missing out on a great opportunity and a great way to distinguish yourself from your peers. Think what you could do and add to your work, career or discipline if your reading ability in Arabic was as good as that in English.

If a command of dialect / spoken Arabic is important to you, or your writing, perhaps, reading offers a break from that skill work and affords great opportunity for cross-training. The words you learn while reading can and do transfer over to other domains.

[This is the first in a series of posts on the importance of reading in learning Arabic. The next post will summarise an academic study of the role of reading in bringing students up to the highest levels of achievement in their Arabic proficiency.]

Is it necessary to read the Quran in Arabic? I have learned from elders and also seen many videos stating that understanding the meaning of the Qur'an is more important than just reading it. As i don't understand Arabic i would like to read the Quran in a language that i understand like English.

So is it permissible that i read the Quran in english (or any other language) while not reading the Arabic part?

I understand you well because I have a situation like you. My native language is Persian but we learn Arabic and English too in our education process. So I can read and compare Quran in both Arabic and Persian, English translation. I strongly recommend you to read Quran in Arabic.

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