Lesson 5

To write the word kEEn we add two dots to the slanting zer mark

To make the sound u as in kUmar a PESH mark is put over the letter as in this word kUn

To make the long OO as cOOl another fat worm like mark is put after the letter as well as the pesh above it as in this word kOOn.

For the mark O as in cOne the worm like mark is on its own without the pesh To make the AU sound as in AUtumn the zabar mark is put above the O . The next figure reads as kAUn (who?)

Lesson 4

To make kin (as in kith and kin) we put a small slanting mark called ZER below the letter K

This vowel mark is often left out in newspapers so when you see kn

you may have to read it as

Lesson 3

Vowel marks
Lets add some accent and vowel marks in between the letter K and N . Reading from the right of the screen the second word is k'n with the k pronounced a little longer since the accent mark (zabar) is over the k . The next word kn' has a longer n since the accent mark is over the n . The shapes of the vowels aa, i, ee, u , oo , o , au ,ae and aae are obvious from the figure and are explained in more detail after the figure .

Lets take our meaningless word kn and add vowel marks to it . The left word in the next figure reads kAAn ( ear). The AA is a vertical straight line. A vowel is not joined to the letter following it so the letter n in kaan is written in its detached form . Note


also the slight change in the shape of K

Lesson 2

Supposing we wanted to make say a meaningless two letter word with a starting ( initial) letter K and ending with N

We would take the intial form of K marked 2 in the figure above and the final form of N marked 4 and join them together . Remember to read it R to L

Easy isnt it ?

Lesson 1

Urdu is a very popular language of the subcontinent , second only in the number of speakers to Hindi. It is the national language of Pakistan and an offical language of UP in India . It is the language of poetry and of literature .You may freely copy these lessons for non commercial uses on to your web site , add sound files or modify them in any way you want

Urdu is written in the opposite direction to English ie from right to left.It is an easy language to write fast in , because it has a built in shorthand ! It is very important to read each line slowly and study each part of a figure closely the first time , and then re-read it carefully again to make the whole learning experience easy


This is the most important lesson so once again do it very slowly and carefully and the rest of the 20 or so lessons will then seem very easy

Each sound is represented by a letter . For example lets look at the letter K and N in in the next figure

Each letter is written in a slightly different form depending on whether it comes in the beginning , middle or end of a word or whether it occurs on its own ie in a detached form



The above figure has the detached , initial . medial and final forms of K and N. You may have noted that the detached and final form form are usually very similar.
Note again that the detached form is on your extreme right then the initial , medial and final.