(continued)
As much as possible I provide English-language sound equivalents for the letters, and only when they are not available do I resort to equivalents in other European languages. Whenever no Western sounds are similar or analogous, I try to explain what goes on inside the mouth when the sound is being uttered or where possible provide audio clips of the letter being pronounced.
Since Urdu and Hindi are more or less the same language divided by different scripts, I've also included a column of Devanagari characters of Hindi to show their correspondence with the Perso-Arabic script of Urdu. The same Devanagari characters are also used to write Sanskrit, Nepali, Marathi and Indian Sindhi. By the way, if you've ever chanced upon the table of Arabic/Devanagari equivalences at this other site, be warned: half of them are completely wrong!
The Arabic alphabet is not particularly well suited to such languages as Persian, Urdu, Pashto and others. For the Arabic language abounds in consonant sounds which simply don't exist outside the Semitic family of languages, but at the same time it lacks the tremendous wealth of vowels found in Asian and European languages.
In order to compensate for the missing sounds, Persian scholars invented several letters for the sounds that don't occur natively in Arabic, such as P and Ch, among others. But those Arabic letters without sound equivalents in the borrowing languages, were not, as logic might suggest, discarded. For example, the sound of the Arabic letter Saad does not occur in any native Iranian, Indic, or Afghan words. Yet the letter Saad is faithfully preserved in the spelling of Arabic loanwords in these languages, even if it's pronounced no differently from the Arabic letter siin.
What this means is that Persian, Urdu and Pashto are riddled with letters which are totally redundant for the purposes of representing actual speech. Thus, in Persian, four letters represent the identical Z sound; three for the identical S; two for the identical T; and two for the identical H. (Personally, I think this situation is idiotic, but there it is.)
Given these differences, a Persian, Pashto or Urdu word can no more be correctly sounded just because it's written in a variant of the Arabic, than could an Anglophone be able to sound a Swedish text correctly just because both languages employ variants of the Latin script.