SabaaH al-kheir! Right now we're going to talk about how to negate conjugated verbs in
formal Arabic, and negation in Arabic is called النّفي. And in this video, I'm going
to assume that you have already studied how to conjugate verbs in the past, and
present tense, and how to control that process; if you need a refresher, we have
two separate videos on how to do that, so you might want to go back and take a
look, so you feel prepared to do this. Also an important point, in this video
we're going to focus entirely on العربية الفصحى, formal modern Standard
Arabic. The colloquial forms tend to have fairly distinct ways of negating verbs,
and we're going to have a separate video for you on how to negate verbs in
Egyptian and Levantine dialect. So to negate a present tense verb, all we need
to do is add the word لا directly in front of the conjugated verb. Remember
that لا also simply means 'no' in Arabic. So let's take a couple of
examples. Let's start with affirmative sentences, and then we can turn them into
negative sentences. For example,
ندرس الفرنسة, we study French.' if we' want to say 'we do not study French,' all
we need to do is add لا directly in front of the verb. Easy-peasy.
Very simple. Or if we wanted to say 'Maryam drinks coffee.'
مريم تشرب القهوة.
Generally speaking, she drinks coffee. She's a coffee drinker. Now
we want to say 'Maryam does not drink coffee.'
Not ever. She prefers tea. We can't put لا right at the front of this sentence,
because then we would be saying something like 'not Maryam,' right, and
Miriam is not what we're negating, we're negating this verb تشرب, right,
so we're going to put لا right there, right in front of the verb.
مريم لا تشرب القهوة.
In the past tense, one common way to negate a
verb is by using the particle ما, which we also put right in front of the verb.
We can't use لا in the past tense. That is a very logical and intuitive mistake
to make, especially if you're still getting a handle on the past tense, but
we need to use ما, we need to use this separate word to negate past tense verbs.
So let's take some other examples. Let's start again with affirmative sentences.
If we want to say 'we read the book,' we would write
قرأنا الكتاب.
And once again, all we need to do to negate it, to
say 'we did not read the book,' is to add ما right in front. Or 'they lived in Cairo.'
سكنوا في القاهرة.
'They lived in Cairo.' All we need to do to negate it is to put ما
in the front. Now, for negating the future in MSA, in Standard Arabic, we use a
special particle لَن in front of the conjugated present tense verb. And it
also has an effect on the case endings, the very final vowels of the verb. We
also have an alternative way of negating the past tense. We can use ما in Standard
Arabic, or in formal situations, in formal speechifying or written language,
it's also very common to use another particle لَم, again, in front of the
conjugated present tense verb. Both of these, once again, have an effect on the
final vowels of the verb that they're negating, and if you're interested in
learning how to control those forms at this point, we actually have a separate
video where you can go and learn exactly how to use them and exactly the effects
that they're going to have on those conjugated verbs.
Once again, this is formal Arabic, العربية الفصحى, and we're going to have 50 00:04:55,820 --> 00:00:00,000 another video, a separate video on the forms of negation in colloquial.