Marhaba! Right now, we're going to talk about the verb كان, which is a very
important and useful verb that we can use in Arabic to situate people, things,
and actions in the past. The closest equivalent in English would probably be
'was.' Remember that we don't really have a verb for 'to be' that we use in simple,
one-clause, present-tense sentences in Arabic, we have other ways of expressing that
idea usually, but if we want to talk about something or someone in the past,
things are a little bit different. So كان is a verb, and as you can see here,
it conjugates like other past tense verbs. We have a series of suffixes that
are virtually identical to the suffixes that we use with other past tense verbs.
Here we have a chart of the pronouns that are used most commonly in
colloquial speech. You will notice that كان, there's a big difference in that its
medial letter, that 'alif,' sometimes disappears, right? أنا كنتُ, هو كان,
هي كانت.
كان is what Arabists sometimes call, in English, a 'hollow verb,'
and we're going to see a few more of those later, and we use that expression,
الفعل الأجوف, it is in Arabic, to refer to verbs that have a medial vowel that kind
of shape shifts. Sometimes it disappears, sometimes it takes on another form. But
for our purposes, we really just need to get a handle on this conjugation. And you
can save yourself some confusion by noticing that all of the third-person
forms right: هم، هي، هو retain that 'alif,' whereas all of the other first and
second person forms do not.That can be a very useful thing to keep in mind. So we
can use كان to situate things simply in the past right the way we use 'was,' like
'he was the only student in the library,' let's say. We could say
(هو) كان الطالب الوحيد في المكتبة.
'He was the only student.' So كان here is a verb, and we have a جملة فعلية, a
verbal sentence, to express that idea, right? We can also use كان to situate
actions in the past, the way we use the past continuous in English or the phrase
'used to,' right? If we want to say 'I was working at home,' right, if we're setting
up a narrative, I could say
أنا كنت أعمل في البيت.
'I was working.' I'm situating this
conjugated present tense verb in the past, by using conjugated كان, right? So
this is sort of my 'I was.' Or sometimes it can refer to longer stretches of
time in the past right, if we want to say 'she used to live in Egypt,' then again we
would use conjugated كان for her, and then conjugated 'live' for her. So
(هي) كانت
كانت, now conjugated for ,present-tense
literally, were saying 'she was she lived,' but the meaning is 'she used to live,'
كانت تسكن في مصر.