Arabic Verbs

If you're trying to learn Arabic Verbs you will find some useful resources including a course about Verbs in the present past and future tense... to help you with your Arabic grammar. Try to concentrate on the lesson and notice the pattern that occurs each time the word changes its place. Also don't forget to check the rest of our other lessons listed on Learn Arabic. Enjoy the rest of the lesson!

Arabic Verbs

Learning the Arabic Verbs is very important because its structure is used in every day conversation. The more you master it the more you get closer to mastering the Arabic language. But first we need to know what the role of Verbs is in the structure of the grammar in Arabic.

Arabic verbs are words that convey action (bring, read, walk, run), or a state of being (exist, stand). In most languages a verb may agree with the person, gender, and/or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object.

Arabic to has only 2 times, the perfect and the imperfect, but there is a difference, in the west we look at the points in time in where a action takes place, the Arabs however look at the aspect of a verb meaning they ask is the action finished or not (They don’t ask themselves when did it finish or not). Of course a finished action corresponds with the past as does a unfinished action with the present, but not necessarily so. Here are some examples:

Arabic verb conjugation is a bit complex, although very regular the so called semivowels alif, waw and ya and the glottal stop hamza cause irregularity in Arabic verb conjugation. The simplest Arabic verb excist out of three consonants like كتب KaTaBa meaning he wrote or he has written. The past tense is conjugated by suffixes, the present tense by prefixes. The Arabs use the verb fa3ala (to do) to represent all possible forms a verb may have. The problem lies in the fact that any of those root consonants might be an hamza, the glottal stop or an alif, a waw or a ya, the so called semi-consonants. They might be retained or disappear according to certain rules.

Arabic verbs have ten (even more) forms. To give you an example,third rule علَم allama means to know, The second form علّم allama with the second consonant doubled means to let know meaning to teach, the fifth form تعلّم ta3allama means to let your self know meaning to study! The tenth form istaf3ala means in general to think to act out an action described by the verb, so istahhasana to think to be beatifull from hhasana to be beautiful. I once made a joke during my Arabic studies. In Holland we call a street car (an electric street car) a tram. This exactly fits the Arabic verb paradigm. Back in those days I sometimes sat in the tram without a ticket which we Dutch call zwart rijden (driving black). So I said if tram would be an Arabic verb ترم TRM the zwart rijde would be translated as IstTarama استرّم thinking to ride on a tram (with a ticket).

As you can see from the example above, the structure of the Verbs in Arabic has a logical pattern. Locate the Verbs above and see how it works with the rest of the sentence in Arabic.

List of Verbs in Arabic

Below is a list of the conjugated Verbs in the present past and future in Arabic placed in a table. Memorizing this table will help you add very useful and important words to your Arabic vocabulary.

Verbs in the present past and future tense have a very important role in Arabic, therefore they need very special attention. Once you're done with Arabic Verbs, you might want to check the rest of our Arabic lessons here: Learn Arabic. Don't forget to bookmark this page.