The present form of the verb, and the future

The past form of a verb tells you who acted by its ending. The present form tells you mostly by its beginning: a letter in front of the root. This lesson teaches that, four more common verbs, and the letter sa-, which turns the present into the future.

The new words

The letter in front

In the present form, the first letter says who does the action:

• ya- is "he", and with -ūna at the end, "they";
• ta- is "you", and also "she";
• a- is "I";
• na- is "we".

Yarā is "he sees": ya- in front of the verb raʾā, "saw", whose hamzah (the middle letter of the root r-ʾ-y) drops out in this form. The corpus marks the verb as imperfect, its name for the present form, and third person, masculine, singular.

Fa-taʾtūna is fa, "so", then taʾtu, "come", with ta- in front for "you", then ūna, the plural "you" of the second lesson. The corpus marks the verb second person, masculine, plural, and divides ūna off as the doer.

The future

Sa-, joined to the front of a present verb, says the action is still to come.

Sa-yaʿlamūna is sa, "will", then yaʿlamu, "know", the present of ʿalima from the last lesson, then ūna, "they": "they will know". You know every part of this word.

Giving

Yuʾtī is the present of ātā, "gave". Its first vowel is u, not a: the corpus marks ātā as form IV, a pattern of the verb that the next stage of the course teaches.

In a sentence

This sentence was written for practice. Arā, "I see": a-, "I", in front of the verb.

Reading

الكلمات التي تعرفها كاملةً بعد هذا الدرس مُعلَّمة.

Recall

• Which letter in front of a present verb means "we"?
• What does sa- do?
• In yarā, who sees?

Answers: na-; it makes the verb future; "he".

Next

The next lesson teaches "every", "thing", "between", "before", "then", "or", "when" and "that", and how two nouns are joined so that one belongs to the other.