How Arabic letters connect (and why words look different from the alphabet chart)

You learn the alphabet from a chart: twenty-eight letters, each in its own box. Then you look at a real word and can't find half of them. كتاب (kitab, a book) is four letters from the chart, and only the last one looks anything like its box.

Nothing is wrong with you or the chart. Arabic is always joined up, in print as well as by hand, and letters change shape to join. Once you know the three rules below, the shapes stop being random.

Rule 1: every letter has up to four shapes

A letter's shape depends on where it sits: alone, at the start of a word, in the middle, or at the end. The chart shows the alone shape, which is the one you'll see least.

The good news is that for most letters the change is a trimmed tail, not a new letter. The start and middle shapes lose the flourish at the end so they can join onto the next letter. ه is the exception everybody complains about: its four shapes barely resemble each other, so it's worth learning on its own.

Rule 2: some letters are only told apart by dots

Trim the tails off and several letters share the same body. ب ت ث ن ي all become the same small tooth at the start or in the middle of a word, with one dot below, two above, three above, one above, or two below. ج ح خ share a body, and so do د ذ, ر ز, س ش, ص ض, ط ظ and ع غ.

This is where most early reading mistakes come from, so it's what the game below drills: the wrong answers are always letters with the same body and different dots.

Rule 3: six letters never join forwards

This is the rule the chart never mentions and the one that explains the gaps. Six letters join to the letter before them but never to the letter after:

ا د ذ ر ز و

So after any of them, the next letter starts again as if it were the start of a new word, even though it isn't. That's why Arabic words have gaps in the middle:

• كتاب kitab: كـ joins ـتـ joins ـا, and then alif stops. The final ب stands on its own, in its alone shape.
• دار dar, a house: three letters, and none of them is joined forwards, so all three stand apart.
• ورد ward, roses: the same again. A word can be made entirely of non-joining letters.
• مدرسة madrasa, a school: مد, a gap, ر, a gap, سة. One word, three pieces.

A gap inside a word is not a space between words. Spaces between words are wider, and with a little practice your eye separates the two without trying.

One last thing: ل followed by ا is always written as the single shape لا (la). It's the only joined pair you have to learn as a shape of its own.

Putting words back together

The best way to make the rules stick is to build words from their letters and watch the shapes change as you go. In the game below, each word is broken into tiles. Tap them in order, right to left, and the word joins up as you build it. Several of the words have a non-joining letter, so look out for the gap.

Typing it

You never pick a shape when you type Arabic. You press the letter and the font chooses the shape from its neighbours, gaps included. If you don't have an Arabic layout, the phonetic keyboard maps English keys to Arabic sounds, so you can type by sound instead of hunting for letters.

And if you're still learning which letter is which, the alphabet page plays every letter's sound and shows all four shapes side by side.