The comparison of the letters and how they are pronounced are going to be explained further in part 2.
To enter a house, one should enter through its doors and not through its windows. This is exactly the case with learning languages. To start learning any language one has to start with letters, which are the doors of any language. For example, Arabic and Persian are two completely different languages, but they have some characteristics in common. One of those common characteristics is their alphabets, which are closely related. So it would be wise to start learning them side by side, at least at the first stage.
Unlike the English language, which is read from left to right, the Arabic language is read and written from right to left. Of the 29 letters; three are long vowels while the rest are consonants. The Persian alphabet shares the letters and the structure of the Arabic language. The Persian language has four extra letters that are added to the set to be counted finally as a total of 32 letters.
As it may be noticed by many people, there are letters in the Arabic language which do not have an equivalent item in English. The pronunciation may be difficult for a non Arab speaker; (including the Persian speakers), due to some words which are written the same but pronounced slightly and differently. Also, most of the letters in Arabic, as in English, have three forms or styles of writing them. These forms differ according to the position of the letter, i.e. whether it comes in the beginning, the middle or the end of the word. Likewise, there are few words which stand alone and are always written in one form, as they neither join the succeeding letter nor the letter which comes before it.
The letters, which are found in the Persian alphabet but not in the alphabets of the Arabic language, belong to those sounds that are not used in the Arabic language. Mostly these letters are of those equivalent English sounds of letters or words which do not have their equivalent in Arabic language, such as the sound (ch).
As it is, Arabic and Persian share nearly 99 percent of the same letters. There are many online tutorials which teach the Arabic and the Persian language, for those who want to helped to pronounce the letters properly, such as:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBC5bjQvB78&feature=related
http://www.shariahprogram.ca/Arabic-alphabet.shtml
http://www.easypersian.com/W1/persian_alphabet.htm