سلام

I finally got round to doing the first lesson from my Beginner's Dari book.

It is mostly about the letter Alef which looks like (ا or آ). The 2nd version has a mad on top which looks a bit like a Greek tilde. (~) If a word starts with the regular kind of Alef (ا) then it's a short 'a', 'e', 'i', 'o' or 'u' sound. If it's an Alef mad, though, (آ) then it's a long 'a' sound. When an Alef occurs elsewhere in a word, it's always the long version. The mad is not written in these cases, though.

Another weird thing is that when an Alef is preceded by a Laam (ل) , they form a bizarre shape called a laam aleflaa. It looks like this: لا

So, the title of this post (سلام) is "salaam" which is a greeting in countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan. I believe that literally it means peace although it's often used as a "hey, wassup" kinda deal as well.