Write your first Arabic word

In the previous lesson we learned how to laugh in Arabic texts:

ههههه

And we learned the ring shaped Arabic letter h and its four forms:

In this lesson we will write our first real Arabic word. But first we need to learn two more letters.

The letters s and l

These curvy, wave shaped figures are the four forms of the Arabic letter s:

The arabic letters h and s have a lot in common:

• Each letter have four different forms.
• The isolated form is used when the letter stands by itself.
• The initial form has a tail to the left, to connect it to the next letter.
• The medial form has tails on both sides, to connect it to the previous and the next letter.
• The final form has a tail to the right, to connect it to the previous letter.

This is true for most letters in the the Arabic alphabet. And for the next letter we will look at, the Arabic letter l:

Note that it looks similar to the capital L. But it is directed to the left, since Arabic is written from right to left.

Now we know three Arabic letters. And they all behave just like we learned in the previous lesson:

• Arabic letters are connected, like handwriting
• Arabic letters have different forms

Writing easy

We will now use the three Arabic letters we have learned to write our first Arabic word.
I will not reveal what word it is yet... but it is pronounced "sahl".

The wave shaped letter s will start our word. Which of the letters' four forms are most suitable for a letter placed in the beginning of a word? The initial form of course!

سـ

The initial form has a tail directed to the left to connect it to the next letter. The next letter will be placed to the left, since Arabic is written from right to left.

The next letter will be the ring shaped letter h. It will be placed in the middle of the word, after s and before l. Therefore, we will choose the medial form:

ـهـ

Now we are ready to connect them:

سهـ

Nice! But it looks like it is missing a letter in the end. Let's complete the word!

The last letter will be the L shaped letter l. I think you can guess what form we will choose. The final form of course!

ـل

The final form has a tail to the right, to connect to the previous letter.

Let's connect all three letters and our word is complete:

سهل

Was that easy? At least we just wrote the Arabic word for easy.

Use vowel if you want

Now the Arabic word for easy is pronounced "sahl". But we just wrote "shl". We omitted the vowel a. That is totally fine since vowels are not generally written in Arabic texts.

If we do want to show the vowel, it is really easy:

سَهل

The Arabic short vowel a is just written as a short line above the consonant.

Letters one by one

The image below summarizes what we just learned.

It shows that the Arabic word for easy is pronounced "sahl" and consists of three letters (s, h and l) that are joined.

You can see how the letters look when the are joined in the word. You can also see how each of the letters looks by itself, and you can see all forms of each letter. The form that is used in the word is marked with darker color (the intial form of s, the medial form of h and the final form of l).

If you find that image helpful, I am happy to tell you that most of the words on this website has their letters shown like this. The Arabic word for easy is one of them.

In the next lesson we will practice writing more Arabic words.