Talk:Urdu/Alphabet

Teaching Urdu
I would really like to see lessons teaching how to read and write Urdu step-by-step. It's hard to learn from an overview of letters. Lack of examples is another problem, but even if there were examples afterwards the learning situation would be far from perfect because the student would still have to memorise all letters at once in order to be able to begin practising.

What I have found really useful when learning non-Latin alphabets is a "divide and conquer" method that introduces few letters at a time and offers example words for practise immediately after each letter / each set of letters. What's even better is if those example words are understandable without prior knowledge of the language, that is, international words. For example: names of countries, cities or famous people (if their name isn't significantly different in Marathi than in English), common personal names, Urdu words that have entered English, English words that are used in Urdu, words that both Urdu and English have derived from Greek or Latin... The advantage of using these words is that students will be able to quickly see their own progress and the whole learning process becomes as fascinating as solving a puzzle. See the "Read Write and Pronounce Greek" lessons in the Modern Greek Wikibook for an example, or this external page on Cyrillic.

If you'd like to try this approach for teaching how to write Urdu, I'd be glad to help you, even though I don't know it yet (I can read Arabic ok though). Just create a big list of suitable words on a planning page like Modern Greek/Writing lessons plan, answer me here and I'll try to find an optimal order for letters.

Thanks for your efforts to teach a language that is hard to find in European schools!

Junesun 16:42, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

P.S.: If there's somebody generally unsure about how to create good language lessons, I really recommend reading the following two pages about it: Authoring Foreign Language Textbooks and Authoring Foreign Language Textbooks/Bite-sized language lessons.