Learn Urdu: July 2009

Lesson 11

Vowel at the beginning of a sentence .

If a word begins with a vowel eg arm , apple , easter etc. an aliph sign is always put before the vowel mark.
Examples below. Note that the first word is a or ugh as in 'U'nder

Note there are two ae letters. The bottom is used when ae is on its eg Ae cat sat while the one above it is used when AE joins the next letter eg in AEK (one).
If the vowel is not at the start of a word we dont use the vertical aliph and just use the vowel marks as below.

difference between ae and big eee ( there is an extra zer at the bottom for eee). Between u and big ooo and between ooo and au ( au has a zabar on top ). It is important to get up and cram these vowel marks as they make the language very easy to read once you have done that.

*As in Hindi the nasal n as in the word song is marked with a dot over the letter.*

After Aliph the next letters in the alphabet are B , P , Te (soft as in tota-parrot) , T , and S.-written from your R to Left. These letters are pronounced as Be (bay) , Pe , Te , Te and Se.

The S above can be confused with SH which we will see later , so look at it closely.

Its quite easy to guess the four forms of each letter depending on whether it is detached ( to your right ) . comes at the beginning ( second right on your screen) , middle - 3rd from the Right or final (leftmost )

Looking at the above figure and keeping the sign of the aa vowel ( just a vertical line ) , and keeping in mind where the letter comes in the word ,can you read your first sentence in Urdu ? It has a final form of the i which you have not met before ( in the word KI below). Also note the little omega sign -called TASHDID-at the top of B in ABBA. It is a doubler ie it means you have to say B twice , the first B is half pronounced . Read Right to Left.

Do you know what the above - Aap ke Abba ki Kitab - means ? It says this book belongs to your father . Abba is urdu for father . Aap means you and kitab is book. Note also that the two dots for the soft te in Kitab are placed well above the line.
The next figure below has three urdu words and one English word. Can you read them ? Answers are in the next figure after the one below

The answers are

Lesson 10

Sometimes the letter N when it is the final letter is written without the dot in the middle and is not sounded except from the back of the throat as example in the word maa'n for mother.We shall look at this later.

We will end the first lesson here . It is very important to go over this lesson again and again to make sure you have the vowels right. As a test see if you get them all in the next figure.

Here are the answers

One important point to note is that the zabar mark and i mark called a zer are similar but the zabar is on top of a letter while zer which signifies i is below.

You can make similar lessons yourself by using a Urdu font. Open windows character map program - its in the windows directory- and copy some letters . Paste them into a windows paintbrush program using the text tool and save as a monochrome bitmap file. Open this file in thumbs or paint shop pro and save as a gif file. For really large letters you need Universal word program.

Lesson 9

Just go over the vowel marks again. Spend a lot of time sudying the figure below and get up and get it imprinted on your mind. It is extremely improtant to get the vowel marks right . After finishing these introductory lessons red some children's study books. The reason is that newspapers tend to leave out the small vowel marks of little i and little u and tend to put one word on top of another and you will get very confused unless you are confident of your vowels.

The following are the vowel marks which modify the letters.

The madd , hamza and tashdid signs are special characters we will look at in the next lesson

Lesson 8

The vowel mark AA as we noted above is written as a straight vertical line. The next word to it on your left is kin . The vowel mark little i is a small slant line called in urdu ZER is placed BELOW the letter , in this case K. The next word on the second line is KEEN . Two dots are added to the little i - ZER- mark to make a big EE mark below the letter.

Then little u - KUN as in the word crook - the u mark -called PESH- is always above the letter ; next is big U -KOON as in sOOn - note you get a big fat worm like figure added to the little u-pesh- mark , but this worm is on level with the letter.

Next in the figure here

is O as in cone (icecream cone)- the worm on its own makes an O sound ; but when a zabar is added above the letter it makes an Au -KAUN (who in Urdu ) as in AUtumn . Note the difference between the words KOON and KAUN in the bigger figure above. . kOOn has a pesh on top of the worm while kAUn has a zabar on top of the worm.

Next below is ae as in cane (sugar) with two dots below. See if you can spot the difference between the word Cane below and the word KEEN above. Thats right ! , the only difference between an AE vowel mark and an EE one is that EE has an extra zabar in addition to the two dots.This is important to remember.
Last of all in this figure

look again at CANE with the two dots marking the AE sound and the next figure to it CAN . We get the AAE sound in cAAEnada (Canada) by just adding a zabar at the top of the letter

Lesson 7

This is a very important area so make sure you get them all right. There is revision of the vowel marks in the figure below. Note however there is a new accent mark called a zabar above the kn word second from your right. It signifies that the accent should be on k so making and not on n in this word here - so it should sound kughn and not knugh. This will become clearer later. Continuing , the third word from R to L on the top line is the word kaan (ear) . The vowel mark AA is a straight vertical line put after K .Note the K changing shape slightly in the figure for KAAN . A vowel mark like AA is not attached to the letter which follows after it , so N here is written on its own.