Alphabet – Lesson 8

We may now turn our attention to the last group of “useful” Persian letters. After these six letters, you will have learnt 26 letters of the 32-letter Persian alphabet. The remaining 6 are used rather rarely and we will get to them at the end of this tutorial.

All of these consonants exist in English as well, and their phonetic differences between the two languages are minimal. Try to read the below examples to get familiar with the new letters.

In addition to the letter “ع”, hamza is another letter denoting a glottal stop in the middle and at the end of words. It has four forms, so technically you can think of them as four separate letters. However, because of how they are used in the writing system and given the fact that they share a key symbol in their shapes, they are officially treated as variants of a single letter.

As a beginner, you don’t need to worry about choosing which form of hamza to use in different words (hint for nerds: it has to do with the vowels that precede and follow hamza in the word). All you need to know is that they all sound like a glottal stop. The first form of hamza is not joined to its surrounding letters and is used very rarely.