Marhaba! Right now, we're going to talk about some very important verbs that
you're likely to hear in spoken Arabic, and what they all share is that they are
'hollow verbs,' or what we call in Arabic الفعل الأجوف, and you remember from
that video on كان that when we're conjugating كان, that 'was' verb that
situates things in the past tense, we have that little vowel 'alif' that
sometimes disappears, depending on the conjugation of the verb. There are a
couple of really, really powerful verbs in colloquial Arabic that also do this.
So we're going to focus on them, because they share the pattern, pretty much. One
of those verbs is يقول, قال, your instructor might have taught you by now
how to say
كيف نقول ... بالعربية؟
Right? 'How do we
say X, Y, or Z in Arabic?' Has a 'waaw' in the middle. Another verb is يروح, right,
أنا بدّي أروح عَ الجامعة
In Shaami, 'I want to go to the university,' or in Masri,
أنا عايز أروح الجامعة
Also with a 'waaw' in the middle in the present tense.
And finally يشوف, right? 'To see something.'
أنا بدّي أشوف الفيلم الجديد.
Right? 'To see the new movie.' Or, you know,
أنا أشوف رفيقي, .'I see my friend' for example. يشوف. And you'll notice
that they all have that 'waaw' in the middle, and these hollow verbs, again,
the identity of that middle vowel is not stable, it's a shapeshifter, it leads
a double life. And all of them in the past tense, again
in that هو form, third-person singular,
have 'alif.' So if I wanted to say 'I saw the film,' for example, أنا...
'to see,' that's يشوف in the present tense, but in the past tense,
أنا شفتْ
'sha, faa, taa,' right? So I'm going to lose that 'alif that I have in the
هو form. Remember again that هو is kind of the default form for a verb
in Arabic if I'm looking it up somewhere. It's also important to notice that راح
and شاف, these 'to go' and 'to see' verbs are only really found in colloquial.
We're not going to find them in قصحى. قال is also a فصحى verb, we sort of
share them. So if I want to say 'he went to the University,'
هو, to go, يروح in the present tense
but in past tense,
راح, let's say in Masri,
راح الجامعة.
Or if I want to say 'I said hello' in Shaami,
right, I could go here,
أنا كنت، رحت، شفت...
أنا قلت مرحبا.
There are plenty of hollow verbs in Arabic, we certainly haven't covered them all, and
you're going to encounter others. Not all hollow verbs share that 'waaw' in the
present tense. Two verbs that you're likely to encounter at some point, in the
present tense would be, for example, the verb
for 'to sleep.' If we wanted to say 'he sleeps' بالعربي we would say ينام
where we actually have an 'alif' as that middle letter, or if we wanted to say 'to
live,' in the sense of 'being alive,' right, you know, 'he is alive, he's living,' we
could say
يعيش, where we have a 'yaa' as the middle letter. So as we're learning how
to, as we're learning vocabulary, as we're learning new verbs, we're going to want
to pay attention to any verb that has a vowel as one of its middle letters. But
no matter what the middle root letter of one of these hollow verbs, we can use the
same pattern to conjugate them in our speech, right? So if we wanted to say 'he
slept' in the past tense, I would say نام or 'he lived' in the past tense,
عاش, just like these other verbs where the هو form is شاف, قال, راح, right, 59 00:05:34,190 --> 00:00:00,000 they all share that 'alif' in the past tense.