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Practise Arabic
letters and all

Eight drills, no signup, nothing to pay. Learn why every letter has four shapes and drill which one goes where, trace all 28 with your finger, type on an on-screen Arabic keyboard that shows you which key each letter sits under, and say the phrase back to a drill that scores it. The words are Modern Standard Arabic with Amharic meanings; the tutorials below explain where Gulf dialect differs.

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Read these first

Short explainers, none of them longer than two minutes, each covering something students get wrong repeatedly.

This is the thing that makes Arabic look impossible for the first week and obvious by the third. There is one alphabet of 28 letters, but each letter has up to four written shapes: alone, at the start of a word, in the middle, and at the end. It is the same letter, joined up — closer to English cursive than to a new alphabet.

ب + ي + ت  →  بيت   bayt, a house

Notice that ب became بـ at the start and ي became ـيـ in the middle. Nothing was added or removed; they just grew joining strokes. Once you have the 28 letters and this one idea, you can start decoding real words, which is exactly what month one of the reading course does.

Beginners often think a word is two words, because there is a visible gap in the middle of it. Usually one of these six is the reason. They accept a join from the right but refuse to pass one on to the left:

ا   د   ذ   ر   ز   و

So in مدير (mudīr, manager) the د breaks the chain and the word looks split. It is not — it is one word with a built-in gap. This is also why these six are left out of the Letter forms drill here: their start-of-word shape is identical to their alone shape, so the question would have two right answers.

Arabic writes long vowels as letters but marks short vowels with small signs above and below the line — and outside the Qur’an, children’s books and dictionaries, those signs are simply left out. Readers supply them from the word pattern and the context.

كتب could be kataba (he wrote), kutub (books) or kutiba (it was written)

That sounds alarming and turns out to be manageable, because Arabic words are built on regular patterns. Once you know a few, the skeleton plus the position in the sentence gives you the vowels. It does mean reading and speaking have to grow together, which is why the two Arabic courses at Klick sit beside each other rather than one replacing the other.

Worth getting right before you pay for anything. Modern Standard Arabic is the written language — news, contracts, signs, documents, the Qur’an. It is what you learn to read and write, and it is what the words in these drills are. Nobody chats in it at home.

Gulf spoken Arabic is what people actually say in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Kuwait. Different everyday words, simpler endings, faster.

tomorrow — MSA غدا ghadan  ·  Gulf بكرة bukra
where — MSA أين ayna  ·  Gulf وين wēn

If you are travelling for work, the spoken course is what pays for itself. If you want to read, write and sit exams, take the reading course. Plenty of students take both, one after the other. What a drill on a web page cannot do is teach you dialect rhythm and which word is rude in which country — that is a teacher in a room, and it is the reason the spoken course exists.

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Practice is not a substitute for a class

Reading the alphabet is genuinely a month of work and you can start it here. What a page cannot do is teach you the rhythm of Gulf dialect, which word is rude in which country, or how to hold a conversation when the other person speaks fast. That needs a teacher and other students in the room.

Every level at Klick is one month — three sessions a week, two hours each, ETB 5,000 — and you decide each month whether to take the next one. Beginners are taught in Amharic, and every level ends with a filmed 60-second showcase of you speaking.

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Questions

Which Arabic is this?
The words here are Modern Standard Arabic, which is the written language and is understood across the Gulf. Gulf spoken dialect differs in everyday words — bukra instead of ghadan for tomorrow, wēn instead of ayna for where — and dialect is taught in class, not in a written drill. The last tutorial on this page explains which course to take for which goal.
Why are only 22 letters in the letter-forms drill?
Six letters — alif, dāl, dhāl, rāʾ, zāy and wāw — never join to the letter after them, so their start-of-word shape is identical to their alone shape and the question would have two correct answers. Those six are explained in the second tutorial, and all 28 appear in the tracing drill.
Does the tracing pad check my handwriting properly?
It checks the shape: how much of the letter you covered, and how far outside it you strayed. It does not check stroke direction or the order you drew it in. It is good for getting proportions into your hand between classes.
Should I learn to read or to speak first?
Depends on why you are learning. Travelling for work in the Gulf — speaking pays for itself first. Reading documents, studying, or wanting the written language — start with reading. Klick runs them as two separate three-level courses and many students take both.
How much are the Arabic courses?
ETB 5,000 per one-month level, three sessions a week of two hours. Spoken Arabic is three levels and Arabic Reading & Writing is three levels, at Mexico and CMC Michael.
How do I type Arabic without an Arabic keyboard?
The typing drill puts a full Arabic keyboard on the screen. Each key shows the Arabic letter with the Latin key it sits under, so you can see that ب is on F, ي is on D and م is on L, and you can tap the keys instead of typing them. That is the standard Arabic layout used by Windows, macOS, Android and iPhone, so what you learn here works the moment you switch your own device to Arabic. Shift gives the alefs that carry a hamza — أ إ آ.