Happy New Year everyone!!

If you live in our part of the world, the new school year has just begun. And if your children are starting Year 1 or above, they will have to learn the national handwriting system known as Jawi as one of their subjects.

Jawi is taught in all government and most private schools here in Brunei Darussalam. It consists of Perso-Arabic alphabet for writing the Malay language.  But because Jawi is actually a set of symbols or script to represent sounds, I do think, any language may be written in Jawi.

Do take note, that Jawi is  written and read from right to left. It is Arabic-influenced, but has more letters than the actual number of characters or letters in the Arabic language simply because there are sounds in the Malay language that are not found in Arabic.

To help my son learn Jawi, I’ve created a series of charts and worksheets for him during the December holidays in preparation for school.  We also used the Awal Books Jawi Package (Pakej Lengkap Bacalah Jawi), which I shall include a link for you below, should you wish to purchase it. Although my son did struggle in the first couple of days to remember the names and individual alphabet sounds, our perseverance paid off. His reading improved day by day, and one day, he said, “Jawi is actually easy”. The books and writing activities also greatly enhanced our learning process.

Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission. Keep in mind that I link these products because of their quality and not because of the commission I receive from your purchases. The decision is yours, and whether or not you decide to buy something is completely up to you. 

Below are the charts I created as a guide to answer the worksheets.

Jawi Alphabet Names and the Sounds they Make

 

I’ve linked a pronunciation file for each alphabet above in a downloadable PDF file. Download PDF file with audio.

For lots of reading and writing practice, we used the set of books below (Pakej Bacalah Jawi). You can get the entire set here. The entire set costs only RM99 (BND33).

 

Alternatively, each level can also be purchased separately.

Level 1 Books

Level 2 Books

Level 3 Books

In a nutshell, to learn Jawi, we used:

• The charts (as above) and the Jawi worksheets I created

• The Complete Jawi Package books (Pakej Lengkap Bacalah Jawi)

We practised for about 15-20 minutes everyday, and I’m truly thankful that our efforts have paid off quickly. Below is a  peek into the Level 1 reading and writing books. We love how they’ve made reading and writing Jawi so much fun!

 

To explore other books on various subjects, check out the bookstore.