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Learning Arabic script in order to read Urdu

Since my last post on this blog possibly over a year ago, I have begun studying another language: Urdu. 

On 30 June last year our family moved to Bury, Lancashire, where I now serve as minister of Radcliffe Road Baptist Church. Bury is a Lancashire mill town which is now part of Greater Manchester (Mancehster is about 25 minutes by car or tram). A large proportion of the population of Bury are Urdu/Punjabi speakers. I am keen to reach out to them, and have been learning their language with the help of my neighbour and also at least one another acquaintance I have made. 

Urdu, as well as its sister language, Hindi, is part of the large Indo-European language family, and is therefore related to English and other more familiar languages such as German and French. For example the numbers (in Urdu: eek, do, teen) are recognisably similar, and there are many common words such as "naam" (name). Having said that, Urdu is quite challenging to learn, especially now that I am far older than when I was learning other languages. 

Urdu, unlike Hindi, uses a derivation of the Arabic alphabet, which in turn is part of the family of alphabets most often associated with the Phonecians. While for many years Arabic appeared to be an indistinguishable assortment of "squibbles" (apologies to Arabic speakers; in actual fact the script is very beautiful - that was just my perception), I am now learning to discern the different letters, which change form depending on whether they appear at the start, middle or end of the word (there are other variables too). Versions of this same script are used to represent Farsi and related languages, as well as Arabic, and Kyrgyz (which I began learning earlier) can also be represented using this alphabet. 

My "life hack" so far when it comes to the Arabic alphabet, has been to recognise the hallmark features of each letter, regardless of the different forms it takes. For example, "nun" (the letter N) has a single dot above it, or the letter "be" (B) has a single dot underneath it. This means you can recognise what is written, before going on to learn how to write it. 

My brother who lives in Kuwait, an Arabic-speaking country, kindly gave me a set of building blocks with the letters in their different forms. This allows me to construct words. 

The three words below are, in order, the names "Sophia", "Conrad", and "Jenny". 




Arabic is written and read right-to-left. In the case of the top word, the first letter is "saad" (S) followed by "waow" (which is an O or U in this case), then "faa" (F), then "yaa" (Y), and, finally the letter "alif" (A). 
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