Ahlan wa sahlan! Now we're going to talk about how to conjugate present-tense
verbs in Arabic, or what we call in Arabic الفعل المضارع.
We say the present tense; sometimes older grammar books that discuss Arabic will
we'll also talk about the 'incomplete' tense. In English, we have a couple of
ways of expressing present-tense ideas. I can say, for example, 'I study,' or I can say
'I am studying,' and they both carry slightly different meanings sometimes in
English. In Arabic, الفعل المضارع is used to express both of those ideas:
the simple present and the present continuous. 'I study,' and 'I am studying,' we
can do both of these. In Arabic we express the subject of الفعل المضارع
using a combination of prefixes or prefixes and suffixes. We don't need to
use individual pronouns. We have a list of the pronouns here, just for reference,
but it would be a little redundant in most cases to say هو يشرب, for
example, 'he drinks,' unless we really want to emphasize that *he* is doing the
drinking. Most of the time, the prefixes and suffixes will do the work
for us, so in your speech, and your writing, try to avoid the tendency to
overuse those pronouns, because it creates a little bit of redundancy and
can sort of be a roadblock to fluent speech or fluent writing in Arabic. It's
considered sort of more natural style. So here on this chart, we have the prefix
and suffix combinations for a couple of verbs in فصحى, Modern Standard Arabic,
شامي, Levantine, and مصري, Egyptian. You'll notice that the prefixes and
suffixes are in red. We've got two verbs up here in فصحى. We have the stem
فعل which is a formal Arabic word meaning 'to
do' something, and in Levantine and Egyptian, we have a different stem,
عمل, which is more commonly used to express that same idea, 'to do,' in those
dialects. So let's try conjugating a couple of verbs. For example what if,
we want to use some different verbs. Let's say the stem for the verb
about 'studying,' درس. If I want to say
'she studies,' in فصحى, I'm going to take this prefix, this 'taa,' and I'm going to
attach it here.
for تدرس, 'she studies.' Or if I want to say in Egyptian, let's say 'we drink,' I'm
going to take that stem of the verb for drinking, 'shiin, raa, baa,' and I'm
going to go to the first person plural, and I'm going to attach 'taa, nuun.' بنشرب.
You'll notice that in Levantine and Egyptian, we have a 'baa' on the
beginning of these verbs. The 'baa' is common in the present tense for the main
verb in a sentence, the first verb, the first real verb in a sentence. If there's
a second verb following the first verb, or the first verb-like expression, then
we're not going to see that 'baa' typically. So that's something to work on
recognizing, and control is going to come with time. You'll also notice that in the
فصحى, we have two options some of the times. This has to do with grammar and
subordinate verbs, again the second verb coming after the first verb in a
sentence. For now, it's not something to worry about producing, you'll, we'll be
covering that later on, and there's another video about
المضارع المنصوب, that special second ,conjugation, and when to use it. For now
just be aware when you're reading formal texts that you are going to encounter 45 00:04:27,889 --> 00:00:00,000 that variation sometimes.