Arabic
Chinese
English
French
Italian
Japanese
Korean
I also like to read the above scripts these languages use, plus Cyrillic and Greek.
That is why it is easy.
Arabic looks like... how do you even read it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- First of all, Arabic is just an alphabet (it's actually an abjad, but I'm not going into technicalities here). In fact, it only has 28 letters. For the record, Thai has 44 letters, plus about 20 vowels. There's also, of course, Chinese, of which about 2500 are in common use.
- Second of all, Arabic is written from right to left.
So, with that knowledge in mind, let's try something:
| ا | ب |
| This letter is called alif. | This letter is called baa. |
You don't have to worry about how they're pronounced, but all you need to know is that alif makes an "aa" sound and baa makes a "b" sound. For the purposes of this demonstration, all baa's will be in red.
Arabic is like cursive in that you mostly join the letters together. Thus, most letters have an isolated, initial, medial, and final form. Above were their isolated forms. Below is a table for baa's other forms:
| Initial: | بـ |
| Medial: | ـبـ |
| Final: | ـب |
Alif doesn't connect with the next letter, but does with the proceeding letter. With this, we can combine them into words:
 | baab, door |
 | 'ab, dad |
Now, let's do two more letters:
Taa is pronounced "t". It is like baa, only with two dots on the top instead of one on the bottom. Kaaf is pronounced "k." The only form of kaaf needed for this little thing is its initial:
كـNow, with your (very) limited knowledge, read this:
If you read that correctly, that should come out as
ktb. That's because most vowels aren't written in Arabic. t's lk f smn dcdd t strt wrtng lk ths. In fully vocalized text, where all the vowels are written, there are symbols used to denote short vowels, which are the ones omitted in unvocalized text. For the purposes of this, only the short a, or fatḥah, is required:
َThe circle represents where the fatḥah is placed relative to the letter. In this case, it is placed above the letter, like a macron in the latin script (ā). When you fully vocalize the text, it can look something like this:
Which is read as
kataba, meaning "he read." There are many other possibilities, but you get the idea.
TL;DR: Arabic is like cursive, except the whole "never going to use this ever again" thing.
Disclaimer: I do not understand Arabic, nor can I fully read it.
