Write more Arabic words

In the previous lesson we looked at three Arabic letters – letter s, letter h and letter l – and combined them to Arabic word easy.

In this lesson we will practice what we learned by writing two new Arabic words. We start with the most poetical (and anatomical) one.

Heart

The Arabic word for heart is pronounced "qalb".

It actually looks a bit like a q, but more curved and with two dots over it.
The letter have four different forms. The initial, medial and final form have tails to connect to other letters. Just like the letters we learned in the previous lesson.

Beware of the pronunciation of this letter. If you pronounce it like the letter k, you would say "kalb" which acutally means dog! The main difference between k and q is that q is pronounced further back in the throat.

Since we will write "qalb", the letter q is placed in the beginning and we need to use the initial form:

قـ

You already know that Arabic is written from right to left, and that the tail is there to connect to the next letter.

Next letter is the letter l which we learned in the previous lesson.

Since we will place l in the middle we need the medial form:

ـلـ

Now we can connect them and we have two thirds of the word:

قـلـ

The third and last letter is the letter b:

It has four different forms and tails in the places where you expect it.
Since we will place it in the end of the word we need the final form:

ـب

Now we have the Arabic word for heart:

قلب

And if we want to show the vowel a it is no problem since we know it is just a line above the consonant.

قَلب

If you visit the page for heart you will see this illustration:

In the illustration you can see the word in Arabic as it is written (with the letters connected) and you can see the letters one by one. For each letter you can see their different forms, and the form that is used in the word is marked with black font colour.

Before

We just wrote the word for heart which is pronounced "qalb".

By just swapping the last letters we will get the preposition before which is pronounced "qabl".

The beginning is the same; the intial form of the letter q:

قـ

Next is the the letter b, but this time we need the medial form:

ـبـ

Let's connect the letters we have so far:

قـبـ

The last letter is the letter l so we need its final form:

ـل

And the word is complete:

قبل

We can add the vowel if we want:

قَبل

And if you visit the page for the preposition before, you will find this illustration that shows the letters of the word.

If you find the illustration helpful, I'm glad to tell you that most words on this website has one.

The next step

Now I think you understand the principle of writing in Arabic. The letters have different forms and are connected. The first letter in the word is normally in its initial form, the middle letter is normally in its medial form and the last letter is normally in its final form.

That principle will get you very far. But there are some letters in the alphabet that behaves a bit different; they just want to connect with the letter to the right.
In the next lesson we will learn how to use those letters as well. After that you will know how to write any Arabic word!