Discovering the Arabic Alphabet
Unlike English and other Romance languages, you write and read Arabic from
right to left. Like English, Arabic has both vowels and consonants, but the
vowels in Arabic aren’t actual letters. Rather, Arabic vowels are symbols that
you place on top of or below consonants to create certain sounds. As for consonants,
Arabic has 28 different consonants, and each one is represented by
a letter. In order to vocalize these letters, you place a vowel above or below
the particular consonant. For example, when you put a fatHa, a vowel representing
the “ah” sound, above the consonant representing the letter “b,” you
get the sound “bah.” When you take the same consonant and use a kasra,
which represents the “ee” sound, you get the sound “bee.”