Arabic handwriting sheets: printable tracing practice for all 28 letters

Arabic letters change shape with their position in a word: isolated, at the start, in the middle, or at the end. A letter at the start joins only to the left, so it keeps its tail open on the left. A letter in the middle joins on both sides. A letter at the end joins only to the right. A letter alone joins to nothing. That gives most letters four shapes, and it is the first thing a learner of Arabic handwriting must practise: the same letter, four looks, one sound.

The free Cubbbix Arabic Handwriting Sheets tool builds a printable tracing sheet: pick the letters, pick how big they print, pick how many tracing rows each letter gets, and print from your browser. Each row shows the letter large and faint for tracing, then the same letter in its four forms, then a word that starts with it. The faint tracing letters are printed in light grey on purpose, so a pencil line over them stays visible. Nothing is uploaded or stored: the sheet is built in your browser and printed from there.

Figure 1: One letter, four shapes, one sound. Trace it, then write it freehand.

The six letters that break the word

Six letters never join to the letter after them: alif, daal, dhaal, raa, zaay and waaw. They join to the letter before them, but never to the letter after them, so a word breaks after them. That is why the word daal has a visible gap between daal and alif even though both letters are in the same word, and why a word after waaw starts fresh. For these six letters, the start-of-word shape is the same as the isolated shape, and the middle shape is the same as the final shape, because they only ever join on one side. They are the simplest letters to learn, and a good place to start a first sheet.

All other letters have four different shapes, and the change is not decoration: it is how the script joins. A learner who only knows the isolated shape cannot read joined words, because the joined shapes look different from the single shape. Practising the four forms together, letter by letter, builds the habit of reading joined words instead of single letters, which is the step that turns letter recognition into reading. Start with the six non-joining letters, then move to the joining letters, a few at a time.

Figure 2: Initial joins left only, medial joins both sides, final joins right only, isolated joins nothing.

How to practise and print

Trace the faint letter first, then write it freehand on the ruled line below it, then write the word. Say the letter's name and sound while writing it: the sound, the shape and the hand movement together are what make the letter stick. One sheet per session works better than a whole alphabet at once: pick four letters, print, practise, then move on. A larger size suits a first learner; a smaller size suits a learner who already writes the letter and needs to practise words.

Print from the browser's print button, with background graphics on if your printer hides the faint tracing letters. The sheet uses printed shapes, in the device's Arabic font. The handwritten form of haa in the middle of a word looks different in some styles, and a teacher should show that variant separately. The same applies to the final form of haa in some handwriting styles: the sheet gives the standard printed forms, and a teacher fills in the local variant where it differs.

Figure 3: Trace the faint letter, write it freehand, then write the word. Say the sound while you write.

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