Manual Transliteration Systems I have used

Arabic:: Library of Congress , International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) (scroll to yellow), Foreign Service Institute (page 13 of Smith's 1969 Modern Written Arabic)
YIVO for Yiddish and Hebrew

Persian: SDSU Language Acquisition Resource Center LARC transliteration system and Dr. Atefeh Oliai's variations on this

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Russian: IPA

American Sign Language (ASL): SignWriting as used by researchers at the Salk Institute (La Jolla, CA)

Handling special characters

Embedding IPA and non-Latin characters so they display on a screen using Unicode

"pharyngeal fricative" is not an expletive

____IPA___decimal__hex
ح__ħ_____295____0127
voiceless pharyngeal fricative

In English, try saying "hot sauce" to get the right /h/.





references:
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in Unicode (Wells)
http://schools-wikipedia.org/wp/a/Arabic_language.htm move to dialects section

Practice reading

Omniglot's Arabic alphabet

phonetics of Arabic

http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/IPA_chart_(C)2005.pdf The international phonetic alphabet (IPA) can be used to transliterate Arabic

http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/about.html# Articulatory anatomy of Spanish and English offers a 2-D model of English and Spanish speech segments (phonemes), along with relevant video of native speaker utterances
This link was presented at length in class by the instructor to demonstrate the articulation of the /x/, the voiceless velar fricative, which is common to Arabic and Castillian Spanish.