SabaaH al-kheir! In this video, we're going to talk about how to connect main and
dependent verbs in formal Arabic using the particle أنْ. أنْ serves a function
very similar to the English word 'to' in sentences like 'I want to study
literature,' or 'she likes to play chess,' to separate the main verb from the
dependent verb. And we often see the particle أنْ after certain specific
words in formal Arabic. Some of them are verbs like يريد, the formal Arabic
verb for 'to want,' or يستطيع 'to be able to,' or يحبّ, 'to like... to do
something,' so you'll often see أنْ after those verbs. Bear in mind that أن really
isn't used very much in colloquial speech; there are different ways to
connect dependent verbs in Egyptian and Levantine, and we have a separate video
on how to construct those sentences in spoken registers. أن is pretty unique to
العربية الفصحى, to MSA, formal Arabic. So when we're forming a sentence
using أن, the verb that follows the particle needs to be conjugated for its
subject in مضارع منصوب. Again, we have this chart with the
formal Arabic verb يفعل conjugated in the three sort of
varieties of مضارع that we encounter. المنصوب is actually referred to in
some text books describing Arabic as the 'subjunctive' version of the verb, because it
is often used in structures like this that express possibility, or actions that
haven't yet occurred, things like that. Once again يفعَل, we can apply this
template of منصوب and the endings of المضارع المنصوب to any other verb
that we like. So let's take a look at some examples. If we want
say, for example, 'they want to eat at the restaurant,' we could render that: you read
يريدونَ أن يأكلوا في المطعم.
So after أنْ, we need to use our منصوب form of that conjugated verb. Another
example: 'we can read in Arabic.' We could say
نستطيع أن نقرأ بالعربية.
And after أن,
نقرأَ, we're going to need that 'fatha' if we're fully
vocalizing our text, to indicate that we're using المضارع المنصوب.
نستطيع, if we wanted to fully vocalize it, since there haven't, since
no conditions have arisen in our sentence yet that require changing the
'mood' of the verb in any way, we would go ahead and use our default form,
المضارع المرفوع, so for the sake of being complete we could put a 'Damma' above it
and يريدونَ, we can add our 'fatha' there, right? And we have our whole
مرفوع form with the 'nuun.' One more example: we could say 'he refused to go to
school.' رفضَ, 'he refused,'
أن يذهبَ إلى المدرسة
Here we're talking about an action that took place in the past, and we see that
because of our conjugated past-tense verb, but after أنْ we always need a verb
conjugated in المضارع المنصوب, in that sort of present-tense form.
It's sort of equivalent, again, if we if we say in English 'he refused to go to
school,' right, the 'to go' is kind of a fixed form, and literally what we are
saying here is 'he refused to he goes' to the school. We need to conjugate it in
the present tense. You also notice that we can express
these same ideas a lot of the time with a مصدر, that verbal noun form. We
have a couple videos on the مصدر. If we wanted, we could instead of using أن and a
conjugated verb in the مضارع منصوب, we could render it as a مصدر form. We could
say
رفض الذّهاب إلى المدرسة.
Literally, 'he refused the going to school.' But if we
want to use أنْ and a conjugated verb, it needs to be منصوب, and that is how we 52 00:05:46,460 --> 00:00:00,000 connect main and dependent verbs in formal Arabic.