Arabic Verbs

Each form of the verb rasama above contains:

Blue font (that’s what you need to keep, the blue font shouldn’t be modified or removed from verb, it stays the same)

Red font (that’s what you need to delete and add your own consonant of the verb you chose to conjugate: kataba è ktb, haraba è hrb…)

Green font (you can keep that one too, but not all the time, sometimes it becomes “a” or “i” instead of “u” depending on the verb)

You may have noticed that the “rs” of the stem “rsm” are always together, that’s the case with all trilateral verbs (verbs with three consonants, which are the most frequently used verbs in Arabic) the first and second consonant go together, so you can use this table with other verbs as well by replacing the letters in red (the stem we used before) and put your own verb stem instead.

The vowel in green may change to “a” or “i” depending on the verb, like for example for the verb nasaha (to advise) instead of using the “u” in green we have to change it to “a” I advise = ansahu, you advise = tansahu…(and not ansuhu .. tansuhu) and so on… (Note that the stem here is “n.s.h” as we mentioned earlier), for the verb daraba (to hit) we use “i” instead, I hit = adribu, he hits = yadribu. (and not adrubu)…

In case you think that this is too complicated, I will tell you that it’s not something unusual, and if you’re a native or learned Spanish, French, German or even English before, you will notice that the vowels in the middle of some verbs sometimes don’t really follow the rule, Examples:

Spanish: yo hablo = I speak, if you follow this rule you would use yo dormo for the verb dormir, but instead Spanish is using yo duermo = I sleep

French: the verb “appeler” if you respect the French rules you may write: je m’appele = my name, but instead the correct form is “je m’appelle” with “ll”

German: the verb “sehen” to see, by following the general German rule we should write: he sees = er seht, but instead the correct form is er sieht.

English: simply take the verb “to go” I go, you go, he gos? Of course not, the right form is he goes as you know. All these examples are not considered irregularities but semi irregularities, which means that they’re modified only for phonetic and synthetic reasons).

If you don’t know how to extract the stem from a verb (even though it’s very easy) we will go through it now: by omitting all vowels from these verbs we will have: dhb = dahaba ذهب  (to go), hrb = haraba  هرب(to run away), ktb = kataba  كتب(to write), nsh = nasaha  نصح(to advise), drb = daraba ضرب  (to hit). Easy!

Note that the second person singular masculine “you” is conjugated the same way the third person singular feminine “she” does. Tarsumu = you draw (singular masculine) and also means she draws.

If you scroll down to the bottom of this page you will find a list of 122 trilateral verbs, they will help you train yourself conjugate them to the right tense.

The past Tense in Arabic:

To form the past tense in Arabic you need to extract the stem from the verb in the infinitive first, for example:

To write = kataba è stem is ktb, now let’s look at the table below to see how this verb is conjugated in this tense: