ابن بطوطة
Eg: I'd have read the first word as alif+ba+noon = ABN
Great job reading the letters though! Learning a language that uses a different alphabet is a tough endeavor (I've tried!).
When diacritics are not present, you need to guess what the word is based on context.
Two examples:
هناك علم على غصن الشجرة
هناك علم في ذلك الكتاب
Notice that the word "علم" is present in both sentences. But once you read the sentences, you'll end up realizing that the words are different. If diacritics were present, this would be immediately obvious!
The two sentences, translated, are:
There is a flag on the tree branch.
There is knowledge in that book.
The word "علم" means either "flag" or "knowledge/science" in these two sentences.
If it doesn't bother you, do you happen to know a good online arabic dictionary, possibly showing letters separatedly and pronounciation
Two good English-to-Arabic dictionaries:
* https://en.bab.la/dictionary/english-arabic/
* https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english-arabic/
The best learner's dictionaries I could find:
* http://arabic-dictionary.lingualism.com/
Al Jazeera has an excellent Arabic learning website that uses clips from their shows and news programs to teach the language: http://learning.aljazeera.net/en/. One cool thing is that they include diacritics in all of the text to avoid the problem we were discussing above.
Feel free to contact me (@aksiksi on Twitter) if you have any further questions. I would be glad to help you as much as I can :)