Learning Arabic Spelling
This quiz is to help me or others learn how to text in arabic. This is meant for people learning spoken arabic (not MSA/fusha). These arabic spellings do not use the diacritic marks (tashkeel), because my goal is for me/others to learn how to spell without them in order to text friends/family, etc. I have included transliterations (in my style) and a simple english translation for each word. I tried selecting high frequency words, and words that could be useful in conversations. This is a short list, I may continue making more quizzes with different categories in the future.
Consonants:
3 represents the ayn (ع), 7 represents the breathy h (ح),Gh represents the ghayn (غ), kh represents the kah (خ). 2 represents a glottal stop. For some words with qaaf (ق), I included transliterations using q and 2 to represent both pronunciations. Th (ث) is like in "with", dh (ذ) is like in "the". The heavy letters are represented by capitalization. S is saad (ص), D is daad (ض), T is Taa (ط), and DH is (ظ) which usually sounds more like a combination of a dh and a z.
Vowels - where it gets complicated:
Ee and y are both used to depict the ya (ي), where it sometimes acts like a long vowel and sometimes acts like a consonant. Along a similar vein, I use oo, or w to depict the waw (و), which also sometimes acts like a vowel and sometimes a consonant. Any sort of vowel at the beginning of a word usually mean that the word begins with an alif (ا). Other than that, vowels in the middle of a word are short vowels (which there are no letters in arabic for) are represented by "a", "i/e" and "u/o". So, if you see "aa", that means the first a represents the short vowel, and the 2nd a represents the alif (ا)
Additional letters that just need to be memorized by brute force:
Some A's at the end of a word take alif maqsura = ى
Adjectives can all be made feminine by adding a ta marbuta to the end: ة / ـة
I represented the ta marbuta by using an "a" at the end of the word, but in spoken arabic, these may be pronounced more like a short "e" sound, because in arabic, the quality of every vowel changes depending on whether the consonants surrounding it are more soft or heavy.
When I do use the tashkeel:
An alif with a tanween (اً) makes an "-an" sound at the end of some words.
Whenever I evoked the name of Allah, I spelled it the official way (الله).
Anyways, this is not down to a science, I transliterate based on vibes alone on how I like pronouncing the words (excluding the cases with ta marbuta). Disclaimer: I am a new learner so it may not be perfect, and also everything depends on the dialect you are learning.