Arabic is written right to left, and most letters change shape depending on where they sit in a word — the same way a cursive lowercase "s" looks different at the start, middle, or end of an English word, except it's built into the alphabet itself.
Tap the circle to hear each letter. Six letters — ا د ذ ر ز و — never connect forward to the next letter, so they only ever have two shapes: isolated, and final (attached from the right only). You'll see those marked below.
Arabic script was originally written with no dots at all — just bare skeletal shapes, decoded from context. Dots were added later purely to split apart letters that share an identical base. Once you see the shared shapes, the alphabet shrinks from "28 things to remember" to about nine shapes plus a dot count.
Arabic script is normally written without these marks — fluent readers infer the short vowels from context, the same way you'd read "Mr" without needing it spelled "Mister." You don't need them to read. They're shown here only so you know what they stand for when you do see them.
Nothing structural yet — just letters you now recognise, strung into real words. Toggle diacritics to see both versions side by side.