In short

Arabic builds a complete statement out of two nouns and nothing in between. “The house is big” is البَيْتُ كَبيرٌ - word for word “the-house big”. Arabic has no present-tense copula - no word for “is” standing between the halves - so there is nothing to leave out and nothing to conjugate. A sentence that opens with a noun like this is a جُمْلَةٌ اسْمِيَّةٌ, a nominal sentence, and it is the first full sentence type you can produce: give it a definite first half and an indefinite second half and you are already saying something.

The engine of the whole thing is definiteness, not word order. البَيْتُ كَبيرٌ is a sentence, but البَيْتُ الكَبيرُ - the same two words, with الـ added to the second one - is not a sentence at all; it is the phrase “the big house”. One little الـ is the difference between making a claim and merely naming a thing, and it has no equivalent in English. Get that contrast into your ear now, because every A1 sentence you write for the next twenty lessons rests on it.

The rule

Two slots, no verb. The first half is the المُبْتَدَأ, literally “the thing started with” - the subject you are talking about. The second half is the الخَبَر, “the report” - what you say about it. Between them there is silence: no copula, no linking word, no particle. English needs “is”; Arabic needs a pause.

Both halves are in the رَفْع case. The مُبْتَدَأ and the خَبَر both take the ضَمَّة ـُ as their ending. On a definite noun that is a bare ـُ: البَيْتُ. On an indefinite noun it is doubled into tanwīn ـٌ: كَبيرٌ. So the visible difference between البَيْتُ and كَبيرٌ is not a difference of case - both are مَرْفوع - it is the difference between definite and indefinite. Do not read the tanwīn as “a second case”.

These endings are audible only in careful, formal reading; in ordinary speech the final vowel of the last word is dropped at a pause, and in ordinary writing the marks are not printed at all. The pronunciation guide’s lesson on reading unvocalized text deals with both facts. This path prints every ending anyway, because the ending is the grammar being taught, and you cannot learn what you cannot see.

The definiteness asymmetry is the sentence. This is the rule to memorise:

• definite + indefinite = a sentence. البَيْتُ كَبيرٌ. “The house is big.”
• definite + definite = normally a phrase. البَيْتُ الكَبيرُ. “the big house.”

In the second one the adjective has copied the الـ of its noun, and copying definiteness is exactly what a describing adjective does (that is lesson 8). A خَبَر does not copy; it stays نَكِرَة, indefinite, and that is how the reader knows a claim is being made. Whenever a sentence of yours feels like it never lands, check the second word: an الـ you did not mean to write has turned your sentence into a label.

The خَبَر may be a noun or an adjective. Both behave identically - indefinite, مَرْفوع, tanwīn: سَميرٌ مُهَنْدِسٌ “Samir is an engineer” (noun) and البابُ مَفْتوحٌ “the door is open” (adjective). Arabic does not sort these into two constructions the way English sorts “is a teacher” from “is tired”.

Where the tanwīn is written. On a masculine خَبَر the two ḍammas sit on the last consonant: كَبيرٌ، جَديدٌ، مُهَنْدِسٌ. On a feminine خَبَر ending in ة they sit on the ة itself, after the fatḥa of the syllable before it: جَميلَةٌ، نَظيفَةٌ، مُتْعَبَةٌ. The ة is a real letter and takes the ending like any other; it is never dropped and never replaced by ه when you are writing vocalized Arabic.

The مُبْتَدَأ is normally definite, and at this stage you have three ways to be definite. It can carry الـ (البِنْتُ), it can be a proper name (سَميرٌ، مُحَمَّدٌ), or it can be a pronoun (أَنا، هُوَ). Note that many proper names keep a tanwīn - مُحَمَّدٌ، سَميرٌ - and are still definite: tanwīn marks indefiniteness on ordinary nouns, but a name is definite by nature. (A whole class of names - أَحْمَدُ، فاطِمَةُ - takes no tanwīn at all; that is lesson 41.) An indefinite first word on its own gives you no sentence: بَيْتٌ كَبيرٌ is just “a big house”.

A pronoun as مُبْتَدَأ carries no case ending. أَنا مُدَرِّسٌ، هُوَ مَشْغولٌ، هِيَ مُتْعَبَةٌ. The personal pronouns are مَبْنِيّ - “built”, frozen - so they never take ـُ or any other case vowel; the final vowel you see in هُوَ or أَنْتَ is part of the word itself, not an ending. Only the خَبَر after them shows its tanwīn. Lesson 6 gives the full set.

The خَبَر agrees in gender. A feminine مُبْتَدَأ takes a feminine خَبَر, normally with the ending ة: البِنْتُ جَميلَةٌ، الحَقيبَةُ ثَقيلَةٌ، القَهْوَةُ ساخِنَةٌ. Agreement in number waits for the plural lessons (13-16); apart from the plural pronouns, keep both halves singular for now.

ضَميرُ الفَصْل: when the خَبَر has to be definite. Sometimes what you want to say really does need a definite second half - “Muhammad is the manager”, not “a manager”. Written bare, مُحَمَّدٌ المُديرُ is ambiguous: it reads just as easily as the phrase “Muhammad the manager”, a name plus a title. Arabic clears this up with a pronoun slipped in between the two halves, ضَميرُ الفَصْل, “the pronoun of separation”:

مُحَمَّدٌ هُوَ المُديرُ. اللُّغَةُ العَرَبِيَّةُ هِيَ الأَجْمَلُ.

The separating pronoun agrees with the مُبْتَدَأ in gender: هُوَ for a masculine subject, هِيَ for a feminine one. It is not the subject, it is not the predicate, and - this is the trap - it is not a translation of “is”. You reach for it when the خَبَر is definite. With a normal indefinite خَبَر there is nothing to disambiguate and no ضَميرُ الفَصْل is used: البَيْتُ هُوَ كَبيرٌ is not how the thought is expressed.

Not in this lesson. Saying a nominal sentence is not so needs لَيْسَ (lesson 23); putting it in the past needs كانَ (lesson 32); “I have” and “there is” need a predicate moved to the front (lesson 17). Resist the urge to reach for them - everything on this page works without a single verb.

Forms & patterns

The two slots, with both endings marked

Note الطّالِبُ and الدَّرْسُ: ط and د are sun letters, so the ل of the article is not pronounced and the letter after it doubles. That is lesson 4; here just copy the shadda.

Sentence or phrase? One الـ decides

Gender agreement between the halves

A pronoun in the first slot - the pronoun never changes, only the خَبَر does

With أَنا the خَبَر follows the speaker’s own gender, so a woman says أَنا مُدَرِّسَةٌ. The full pronoun set, including the dual and the plurals, is lesson 6.

ضَميرُ الفَصْل - the separating pronoun

Only the singular هُوَ / هِيَ is tabled here. The dual and plural separating pronouns (هُما، هُمْ، هُنَّ) work the same way, but they wait for lessons 9-16, where their nouns are taught.

Examples

Common mistakes

• البَيْتُ يَكونُ كَبيرًا. -> البَيْتُ كَبيرٌ. - Arabic has no present-tense copula. يَكونُ exists, but it says “it comes to be / it is habitually so”, not the plain “is” of this sentence, and inserting it here is the single most recognisable beginner’s sentence.
• البَيْتُ الكَبيرُ. (meaning “the house is big”) -> البَيْتُ كَبيرٌ. - With الـ on the second word you have written the phrase “the big house”. The خَبَر must stay indefinite for the sentence to say anything.
• البَيْتُ هُوَ كَبيرٌ. -> البَيْتُ كَبيرٌ. - هُوَ is not “is”. The separating pronoun belongs with a definite خَبَر, which كَبيرٌ is not.
• مُحَمَّدٌ المُديرُ. (meaning “Muhammad is the manager”) -> مُحَمَّدٌ هُوَ المُديرُ. - Without هُوَ the words are ambiguous, and the reader is likely to take المُديرُ as a title attached to the name, “Muhammad the manager”. The pronoun is what forces the reading you want.
• البِنْتُ جَميلٌ. -> البِنْتُ جَميلَةٌ. - The خَبَر agrees with the مُبْتَدَأ in gender; a feminine subject needs the ة on the predicate.
• بَيْتٌ كَبيرٌ. (meaning “the house is big”) -> البَيْتُ كَبيرٌ. - Two indefinite words in a row are a noun phrase, “a big house”. In a plain two-word sentence the مُبْتَدَأ has to be definite.
• الطّالِبُ جَديدًا. -> الطّالِبُ جَديدٌ. - Both halves are مَرْفوع. The accusative ـً belongs to the خَبَر of كانَ, which is lesson 32, not here.
• الجَوُّ جَميلُ. -> الجَوُّ جَميلٌ. - For an ordinary noun like جَميل, indefinite and مَرْفوع means the doubled ـٌ, never the bare ـُ. (One class of nouns does take a bare ـُ while indefinite; that is lesson 41.)
• اللُّغَةُ العَرَبِيَّةُ هُوَ الأَجْمَلُ. -> اللُّغَةُ العَرَبِيَّةُ هِيَ الأَجْمَلُ. - The separating pronoun matches the gender of the subject, not of the predicate.
• أَنا مُدَرِّسًا. -> أَنا مُدَرِّسٌ. - أَنا itself is frozen and takes no ending, but the خَبَر after it is a normal indefinite مَرْفوع noun.

Tips

• Read the sentence as an equation: X = Y. The equals sign is not written, it is silence, and English “is” is what you supply when translating out - never when translating in.
• Listen for the tanwīn. In careful reading, ـٌ at the end of the second word is the audible signal “this is a statement”. الـ at the start of it is the signal “this is only a label”.
• Cover the second word of anything you write and ask: did I mean to describe, or to claim? Describe takes الـ, claim takes tanwīn. This single test prevents most A1 errors.
• Build a small stock of paired adjectives you can drop straight into the خَبَر slot: كَبيرٌ / صَغيرٌ، جَديدٌ / قَديمٌ، سَهْلٌ / صَعْبٌ، مَفْتوحٌ / مُغْلَقٌ. Learn each with its feminine in ة from the first day.
• Remember that a name is already definite even though it wears a tanwīn: مُحَمَّدٌ طالِبٌ is a perfectly formed sentence.
• Use ضَميرُ الفَصْل as a fixed pair with a definite predicate: the moment you mean a definite second half, reach for هُوَ or هِيَ. Arabic can manage without it, but with it your sentence can no longer be misread as a phrase.
• Ignore the pronunciation of the endings for now if it slows you down. Read them aloud when you are drilling grammar, drop them at a pause when you are talking - the pronunciation guide’s lesson on the pausal form formalises this.
• Do not try to negate or move these sentences into the past yet. Everything you need for that arrives in lessons 23 and 37; using this pattern in the present is a complete skill on its own.

In short

English sorts words into eight or nine parts of speech. Arabic sorts every word in the language into exactly three: اسْم (noun), فِعْل (verb) and حَرْف (particle). There is no separate class for adjectives, no class for pronouns, none for demonstratives, and none for most adverbs - in Arabic terms all of those are اسْم. Three boxes, and every word goes into one of them. You choose the box by a grammatical test, not by what the word means.

The second half of the lesson is about the little vowel that sits on the last letter. It is not decoration and it is not part of the word’s spelling: it is a job label. On a noun that final vowel says which case the noun is in - that is, what job it is doing in the sentence. On a verb the same three vowels say something completely different: mood, not case. On a particle there is no label at all, because a particle never changes. At this stage your task is only to recognise these endings when they are printed. You are not yet expected to produce them.

The rule

One word, one class - decided by test. Do not ask “what does this word mean?” Ask “what can this word do?” مَريضٌ (“ill”) feels like an adjective to an English speaker, but it takes tanwīn, takes الـ (المَريضُ) and can follow a preposition (عَنِ المَريضِ), so it is an اسْم. Meaning did not decide; behaviour did.

Test 1 - does it take الـ? Only an اسْم can. الكِتابُ، البَيْتُ، الجَديدُ، المَدْرَسَةُ are all nouns. A verb never takes الـ; a particle never takes الـ. If you can prefix the article, you have a noun and you can stop testing.

Test 2 - does it take tanwīn (ـٌ ـً ـٍ)? Only an اسْم can: كِتابٌ، وَلَدًا، بَيْتٍ. Tanwīn is the indefinite mark; verbs never carry it, and neither does any particle you will meet at this level. (Lesson 4 shows that a noun never carries الـ and tanwīn at the same time.)

Test 3 - can it follow a preposition? Whatever comes directly after مِنْ، في، عَلى، إِلى، عَنْ is an اسْم - or, later on, a whole clause standing in for one (lesson 34). في البَيْتِ، مِنَ المَدينَةِ، عَلى الطّاوِلَةِ. This test is the one that catches nouns which fail tests 1 and 2 - see the note on fixed words below.

الاسْم carries case. A noun in a fully vocalized text normally ends in one of three vowels, and that vowel tells you its job: ـُ for the doer, ـَ for the object, ـِ after a preposition. Arabic grammar calls this إِعْراب. English shows the same distinction only on pronouns (he / him), Arabic shows it on every noun.

الفِعْل carries tense and person, and its final vowel is mood, not case. كَتَبَ (“he wrote”) and يَكْتُبُ (“he writes”) are verbs: they say when and who. They refuse الـ and refuse tanwīn. The ـُ on يَكْتُبُ is real and you must print it, but it does not mean “nominative”. It is the default mood ending, and it changes to ـَ or to a sukūn when certain particles come in front of the verb - لَمْ يَكْتُبْ، أَنْ يَكْتُبَ. Those are lessons 33 and 40; here just register that a verb’s last vowel belongs to a different system.

الحَرْف is invariable and means nothing on its own. مِنْ، في، عَلى، إِلى، هَلْ، لا، وَ، أَنْ never take an ending of their own; the most they do is swap a final sukūn for a helping vowel when the next word opens with الـ (مِنَ البَيْتِ). Say مِنْ out loud and you have said nothing - “from” what? A particle only does its work when it is attached to something else. The class is a small closed list of a few dozen words, so you can genuinely learn it; اسْم and فِعْل are open classes with hundreds of thousands of members.

Parse a sentence, word by word. Take ذَهَبَ الوَلَدُ إِلى المَدْرَسَةِ (“the boy went to school”). Four words, three classes: ذَهَبَ is a فِعْل (tense and person, no الـ), الوَلَدُ is an اسْم (it has الـ) ending in ـُ because it is the doer, إِلى is a حَرْف (fixed, meaningless alone), and المَدْرَسَةِ is an اسْم ending in ـِ because it follows a preposition. Every Arabic sentence you will ever read decomposes exactly like this.

The case trio, on one noun. Keep the noun and change its job, and only the last vowel moves: ذَهَبَ الوَلَدُ (he is the one going) - رَأَيْتُ الوَلَدَ (he is what I saw) - نَظَرْتُ إِلى الوَلَدِ (he comes after a preposition). Same three consonants, three different endings, three different jobs. That is the whole idea of إِعْراب in one line.

Recognise, do not produce. For now: when you read a vocalized text, notice the ending and let it tell you who did what. When you speak, you may stop before the ending - pausing on the bare word is what native speakers do at the end of a sentence anyway - that is the pausal form, in the pronunciation guide. The full system, with all its sub-markers, is lesson 40. Nothing between here and there asks you to case-mark spontaneously.

Adjectives, pronouns and demonstratives are all nouns. الجَديدُ (“the new one”) takes الـ and case -> اسْم. هُوَ، أَنا، أَنْتَ can stand as the subject and can follow a preposition (مِنْهُ) -> اسْم. هٰذا، هٰذِهِ point at things and behave like nouns -> اسْم. Time and place words such as اليَوْمَ، غَدًا، أَمامَ، تَحْتَ are nouns too, standing in the ـَ case (lesson 31). If you are tempted to invent a fourth class for any of these, resist: Arabic has three.

مَبْنِيّ: the words with a frozen ending. A مُعْرَب word changes its final vowel with its job (الكِتابُ / الكِتابَ / الكِتابِ). A مَبْنِيّ word is fixed - it keeps one shape everywhere. Every حَرْف is مَبْنِيّ, the past-tense verb is مَبْنِيّ (ذَهَبَ ends in ـَ in every sentence), and a small set of nouns is مَبْنِيّ too: the pronouns, the demonstratives, الَّذي. That is why هٰذا and هُوَ fail tests 1 and 2 and are still nouns - test 3 catches them.

And all of it is invisible in real text. Newspapers, novels and websites print almost no vowel marks: ذهب الولد إلى المدرسة. The endings are still grammatically there and an educated reader supplies them, but nothing on the page shows them. This path prints full تَشْكيل precisely so that you can see the grammar you are being taught; do not expect the outside world to be so generous (reading bare text is its own lesson in the pronunciation guide).

Forms & patterns

The three-way test. One “yes” in the first three rows settles the class immediately.

A sentence parsed word by word: ذَهَبَ الوَلَدُ إِلى المَدْرَسَةِ.

The case trio on one noun - recognition only; the full inventory is lesson 40.

The same three vowels on a verb are a different system. Do not read these as cases.

Fixed (مَبْنِيّ) or variable (مُعْرَب)?

The particles you already need. This is a closed list; a dozen of them carry most of your early reading. The prepositions are covered properly in lesson 16.

Examples

Common mistakes

• الطّالِبُ الْيَدْرُسُ -> الطّالِبُ يَدْرُسُ - a verb can never take الـ. To say “the student who studies” you need a relative clause (lesson 39), not an article glued to a verb.
• يَكْتُبٌ -> يَكْتُبُ - tanwīn belongs to nouns only. No verb in Arabic ever ends in ـٌ ـً ـٍ.
• لَمْ يَكْتُبُ -> لَمْ يَكْتُبْ - the last vowel of a verb is mood, not case, so a particle in front of it can cut it to a sukūn. A noun’s ending would never react to لَمْ.
• ذَهَبَ الوَلَدَ إِلى المَدْرَسَةِ. -> ذَهَبَ الوَلَدُ إِلى المَدْرَسَةِ. - the doer takes ـُ. With ـَ you have said that someone went the boy, which is nonsense.
• إِلى المَدْرَسَةُ -> إِلى المَدْرَسَةِ - whatever follows a preposition is a noun in the ـِ case. (A small class of nouns writes that same case with ـَ instead - إِلى مِصْرَ - but that is lesson 41; everything you meet now takes ـِ.)
• مِنْ هٰذا الكِتابُ -> مِنْ هٰذا الكِتابِ - هٰذا is a noun, not a particle; it sits after مِنْ as a fixed (مَبْنِيّ) form, and the noun that follows still has to show the ـِ.
• الرِّسالَةُ مِنْ هُوَ. -> الرِّسالَةُ مِنْهُ. - pronouns are nouns and can follow a preposition, but the attached form is used there, never the standalone one (lesson 7).
• هَلْ أَنْتَ طالِبًا؟ -> هَلْ أَنْتَ طالِبٌ؟ - هَلْ is a حَرْف: it adds a question and touches no ending. The predicate of a nominal sentence stays as it was (lesson 2).
• ذَهَبْتُ إِلى. -> ذَهَبْتُ إِلى المَدْرَسَةِ. - a particle cannot end a sentence, because it means nothing by itself. إِلى must be followed by its noun.

Tips

• Run the الـ test first. It is one second of thought and it separates nouns from everything else faster than any other question.
• Two vowels, two questions. On a noun the final vowel answers “what job?”; on a verb it answers “what mood?”. Never let a verb’s ـُ tempt you into calling it a subject.
• Memory hook: name, act, glue. اسْم names a thing, فِعْل acts, حَرْف glues the other two together and does nothing on its own.
• Learn the particles as vocabulary, not as grammar. There are only a few dozen and you meet the same twelve constantly; every other word you will ever meet is a noun or a verb.
• Stop translating English word classes. “Adjective”, “pronoun”, “adverb” and “article” have no Arabic box of their own - filing them under اسْم removes about half of the confusion at A1.
• Read case endings aloud when you read a vocalized text, and drop them when you speak spontaneously. Recognition now, production much later (lesson 40).
• Do not panic about unvocalized text. The endings are invisible there, and word order plus context carry you; this path prints them so you can watch the machinery work.
• When a sentence confuses you, parse it like the table above: class, then reason, then ending. Four columns and the fog usually lifts.

In short

English puts a small word in front of the noun: “a house”, “the house”. Arabic marks the same difference in two other places - at the very end of the noun and at its very front - with two signs that can never sit on the same word. The doubled vowel sign called tanwīn says the noun is indefinite: بَيْتٌ. The prefix الـ says it is definite: البَيْتُ. You choose one. Writing both, as in *الْبَيْتٌ, is one of the commonest beginner errors, and it is not a small slip: it is like writing “a the house”.

الـ is spelled identically in front of every noun, but it is not always heard the same way. In front of fourteen letters called حُروف شَمْسِيَّة the ل goes silent and the following consonant doubles instead - الشَّمْسُ. In front of the other fourteen, the حُروف قَمَرِيَّة, the ل is pronounced normally - القَمَرُ. On top of that, a whole family of nouns is already definite without الـ: names, pronouns, demonstratives, and anything carrying a possessive ending.

The rule

1. One noun, one mark. Definiteness is a two-way switch, and Arabic will not let you throw both levers at once:

• indefinite: بَيْتٌ (a house), كِتابٌ (a book), مَدْرَسَةٌ (a school)
• definite: البَيْتُ (the house), الكِتابُ (the book), المَدْرَسَةُ (the school)

Notice what happens to the ending. The indefinite noun ends in the doubled sign ـٌ; the definite noun ends in the single sign ـُ. Tanwīn is exactly the case vowel plus an ن sound that is heard but never written as a letter. So *الْبَيْتٌ and *الْكِتابًا are impossible: the moment الـ goes on the front, the ending loses its second stroke.

2. Tanwīn exists in all three cases. The lesson before this one introduced the three noun endings. Each of them has an indefinite twin, and the pairing is completely regular:

Do not think of tanwīn as “the ending for indefinite nouns” in the singular; think of it as the whole set ـٌ ـً ـٍ, each one carrying its case and the message “indefinite”. Which case a noun takes in a given sentence is decided by the sentence, not by this lesson.

3. الـ never changes its spelling. Whatever follows it - a sun letter, a moon letter, a hamza - you always write أَلِف + لام, joined to the noun with no space: البَيْتُ، الشَّمْسُ، الأُسْتاذُ. Arabic has no separate word for “the”, and no space is ever left after الـ.

4. Sun letters: the ل is written but not pronounced. Fourteen consonants swallow the ل of the article. When one of them follows الـ, the ل is not heard at all; instead the sun letter itself is doubled, and you mark that doubling with a shadda:

الشَّمْسُ، الرَّجُلُ، النّورُ، السَّلامُ، الطّالِبُ، الدَّرْسُ، الزَّيْتُ، الصَّديقُ

In fully vocalized writing the ل of a sun-letter article carries no sign at all - no vowel and no sukūn - because there is nothing there to pronounce. The shadda on the next letter is your instruction: hold that consonant twice as long.

5. Moon letters: the ل is pronounced. The other fourteen leave the article intact. Here the ل is heard and the following letter is single. Strict vocalization puts a sukūn on that ل - الْقَمَرُ - though most printing, this lesson’s lists included, leaves it unmarked:

القَمَرُ، الكِتابُ، البَيْتُ، المَدْرَسَةُ، الوَلَدُ، الجَبَلُ، العَيْنُ، الهاتِفُ

The two names come from the two example words themselves: شَمْس begins with a sun letter and قَمَر with a moon letter, so each word demonstrates its own class.

6. Why the split is not arbitrary. Every one of the fourteen sun letters is produced with the tip or the blade of the tongue against the teeth or the ridge behind them - the very same region where ل is made. A consonant made in the same place simply absorbs its neighbour. The moon letters are made elsewhere: on the lips, in the throat, at the back of the mouth. So your tongue will usually predict the class for you - but the classes were fixed on an older pronunciation, so check the list where you are unsure. ج is the trap: today it is made at the front of the mouth like a sun letter, yet it is lunar - الجَبَلُ, never *الجَّبَل. And note the neatest case of all: ل is itself a sun letter, so it doubles into itself - اللُّغَةُ، اللَّيْلُ، اللَّوْنُ.

7. هَمْزَةُ الوَصْل: the alif drops after a preceding word. The alif of الـ is a “connecting” alif (the pronunciation guide’s hamza lesson). It is pronounced only when the article opens the utterance. As soon as another word comes in front of it, the alif is not pronounced at all and the article leans directly on the last vowel of that word - the two run together as one breath:

• قَرَأْتُ الْكِتابَ - the ending of قَرَأْتُ runs straight into the ل
• ذَهَبْتُ إِلَى الْمَدْرَسَةِ
• الوَلَدُ فِي الْبَيْتِ
• خَرَجْتُ مِنَ الْبَيْتِ - مِنْ ends in a consonant, so it borrows a fatḥa to link up

That sukūn on the ل is there in either position; what changes mid-sentence is only the alif, which stops being pronounced - so الْ inside a sentence is read straight off the previous word’s vowel. The Qur’an and other sacred texts mark the silent alif with a waṣla, the head of a small ص written over it (ٱ); ordinary printing, including this lesson, leaves the alif bare. With a sun letter nothing extra is visible at all, because the ل had no sign to begin with: رَأَيْتُ الشَّمْسَ.

8. Writing tanwīn fatḥ. The accusative tanwīn is the only one that changes the spelling of the word: an extra alif is added as a seat for it, and that alif is silent.

• كِتابًا، بَيْتًا، وَلَدًا، جَديدًا

Two positions are in use in print - over the last letter (كِتابًا) or over the added alif (كِتاباً). They are the same thing; write it the first way and read both. Three groups of words take no extra alif:

• words ending in ة: مَدْرَسَةً، سَيّارَةً، كَلِمَةً
• words ending in ء that already sits on a long alif: ماءً، سَماءً، دَواءً
• words ending in ى: فَتًى، مَعْنًى، مَقْهًى

But a hamza that does not follow a long alif behaves like any other consonant and does take the seat: شَيْئًا، جُزْءًا، عِبْئًا.

9. Definite without الـ. Do not reach for الـ every time English says “the”. Several classes of word are inherently definite and reject the article:

• proper names: مُحَمَّدٌ، فاطِمَةُ، مِصْرُ، لُبْنانُ - so *الْمُحَمَّد is wrong. (A number of place names do carry the article as part of the name itself: القاهِرَةُ، المَغْرِبُ، العِراقُ. Learn those as spelled.)
• pronouns: هُوَ، هِيَ، أَنا، أَنْتَ (lesson 6)
• demonstratives: هٰذا، هٰذِهِ، ذٰلِكَ (lesson 13)
• nouns with a possessive ending: كِتابي، بَيْتُكَ، سَيّارَتُها (lesson 7) - “my book” is already the specific one, so *الْكِتابي is impossible
• the first term of an إِضافَة: بابُ الْبَيْتِ، مِفْتاحُ السَّيّارَةِ (lesson 20) - the first word takes neither الـ nor tanwīn; it draws its definiteness from the second word, so بابُ بَيْتٍ is “a door of a house”

One honest wrinkle: a fully declinable proper name still shows tanwīn - مُحَمَّدٌ، خالِدٌ. There the tanwīn is only the ordinary full ending of the word; it is not saying “indefinite”, because a name points at one person by nature. This is the one place where tanwīn and definiteness coexist, and it costs you nothing at A1: just do not delete the tanwīn from names that have it.

10. Flag for later. A class of nouns called المَمْنوع مِنَ الصَّرْف never takes tanwīn at all, in any case: فاطِمَةُ، أَحْمَدُ، مَدارِسُ. Their endings work differently and lesson 41 handles them. For now, if a word you meet has no tanwīn where you expected one, suspect this group rather than a misprint.

Forms & patterns

The two marks side by side, with a feminine noun added so you can see that ة changes nothing about the system:

The fourteen حُروف شَمْسِيَّة - the ل disappears and the letter doubles:

The fourteen حُروف قَمَرِيَّة - the ل keeps its sukūn and is pronounced:

The article at the start of an utterance against the article inside one:

The accusative tanwīn and its seat:

Examples

Common mistakes

• الْبَيْتٌ -> البَيْتُ (the house) or بَيْتٌ (a house) - a noun can never carry the article and tanwīn at the same time. Decide which one you mean.
• هٰذا كِتابُ. -> هٰذا كِتابٌ. - an indefinite noun ends in the doubled sign, not a plain ḍamma. A single ـُ with no article means the word is definite by something else.
• الْشَّمْسُ -> الشَّمْسُ - before a sun letter the ل takes no sukūn, because it is not pronounced. Only the shadda on the ش is written.
• الشَمْسُ -> الشَّمْسُ - and do not leave the shadda out either; without it a reader has to guess, and a beginner will pronounce the ل.
• القَّمَرُ -> القَمَرُ - moon letters never take the article’s ل into themselves, so they never carry a shadda from it. The ل stays audible and the ق stays single.
• الْمُحَمَّدُ -> مُحَمَّدٌ - a personal name is definite in itself, so it refuses the article; and here the tanwīn is simply the word’s normal full ending.
• الْكِتابي -> كِتابي - a possessive ending already makes the noun definite; الـ and a suffix cannot share one word.
• الْبابُ الْبَيْتِ -> بابُ الْبَيْتِ - the first word of an إِضافَة takes neither الـ nor tanwīn, even when English says “the door of the house”.
• كِتابً -> كِتابًا - the accusative tanwīn needs its silent alif seat.
• مَدْرَسَةًا / ماءًا -> مَدْرَسَةً / ماءً - but never after ة، and never after a ء that already sits on a long alif.

Tips

• Store every new noun in your memory with its tanwīn attached: بَيْتٌ، كِتابٌ، مَدْرَسَةٌ. If you learn it bare, you will later have to guess whether it is definite.
• Say the sun-letter words out loud while watching the shadda. The shadda is not decoration - it is the pronunciation instruction, and hearing الرَّجُلُ with a long ر is the whole point.
• Use the tongue test to cut the list down: if the consonant is made at the teeth or just behind them - where ل is made - it is solar. Lips, throat and back of the mouth are lunar. Learn ج by heart as the exception: it feels solar today, but it is lunar.
• Remember that ل is solar itself. اللُّغَةُ is not an exception; it is the rule applied to the article’s own letter.
• Stop looking for an Arabic word for “a”. Indefiniteness is a sound at the end of the noun, not a word at the front of it.
• Before writing any noun, run the two-second check: does it begin with الـ? Then it cannot end in tanwīn - and vice versa.
• Ignore for now which case a noun should be in. This lesson only asks you to pair the right definite form with the right indefinite one: البَيْتُ with بَيْتٌ، البَيْتَ with بَيْتًا.
• In ordinary unvocalized text - the pronunciation guide’s own subject - الـ is still plain to see, but the tanwīn vanishes except for the alif of كتابا. Reading definiteness there is mostly reading the front of the word.

In short

Arabic sorts every noun and every adjective into one of two boxes, مُذَكَّر and مُؤَنَّث. There is no third box and no opting out. Nothing at all marks the masculine - it is just the bare word: وَلَدٌ، كِتابٌ، كَبيرٌ. The feminine is the marked member of the pair, and in the great majority of words the mark is a single letter sitting at the end, ة, called التّاءُ المَرْبوطَةُ. Put it on طالِبٌ and you have طالِبَةٌ; put it on كَبيرٌ and you have كَبيرَةٌ.

Two facts make this less mechanical than it sounds. A short list of very common nouns is feminine with no mark whatsoever - شَمْسٌ، أَرْضٌ، يَدٌ - and a shorter list of nouns ends in ة while being masculine - خَليفَةٌ، حَمْزَةُ. Both lists are vocabulary, not logic, and both are worth an hour of memorising now. Gender also refuses to stay put on the noun: it spreads to the adjective, the pronoun, the demonstrative and the verb, so one wrong guess about a noun surfaces as four wrong words in the sentence.

The rule

1. The masculine is unmarked. Do not look for a masculine ending, because there is none. A noun or adjective with no feminine marker is masculine unless it belongs to one of the memorised lists in point 4:

بَيْتٌ، كِتابٌ، قَلَمٌ، وَلَدٌ، بابٌ، طالِبٌ، كَبيرٌ، جَديدٌ، جَميلٌ

The tanwīn on the end of these words says “indefinite” (lesson 4). It says nothing about gender.

2. The feminine marker you will meet nine times out of ten is ة. It attaches to the bare masculine form and does not change anything before it:

• طالِبٌ -> طالِبَةٌ، مُدَرِّسٌ -> مُدَرِّسَةٌ، مُهَنْدِسٌ -> مُهَنْدِسَةٌ، طَبيبٌ -> طَبيبَةٌ
• كَبيرٌ -> كَبيرَةٌ، صَغيرٌ -> صَغيرَةٌ، جَديدٌ -> جَديدَةٌ، مُجْتَهِدٌ -> مُجْتَهِدَةٌ

Note the fatḥa on the letter in front of the ة: مُدَرِّسَةٌ, never *مُدَرِّسْةٌ. The vowel before a ة is always an a - either the short fatḥa, as here, or the long ā written with an alif: فَتاةٌ، حَياةٌ.

Careful, though: ة is not a switch you may flip on any noun to make a female version. With people and animals it usually does exactly that. Elsewhere it is simply part of the word, and the pair of words may not be related in meaning at all: مَكْتَبٌ is a desk or an office, while مَكْتَبَةٌ is a library. Both are ordinary nouns; only the second is grammatically feminine.

3. Two further feminine endings. They are much rarer than ة, but they are not exotic - you will meet them in your first month, in colours and in a few everyday nouns.

• ـاء, called أَلِفُ التَّأْنيثِ المَمْدودَةُ: صَحْراءُ (desert), حَمْراءُ (red, feminine), بَيْضاءُ (white, feminine), خَضْراءُ (green, feminine).
• ـى, called أَلِفُ التَّأْنيثِ المَقْصورَةُ: كُبْرى (biggest, feminine), صُغْرى (smallest, feminine), ذِكْرى (memory, anniversary), بُشْرى (good news), الدُّنْيا (the world - after a yāʾ this same ending is written with a plain alif; the pronunciation guide’s hamza lesson has the rule).

Two practical warnings. First, these words carry no tanwīn: you write صَحْراءُ and حَمْراءُ, not *صَحْراءٌ. Words ending in a feminine ـاء or ـى belong to a class that refuses tanwīn altogether; lesson 41 explains why, and until then simply do not write it. Second, not every ـاء is this ending. In ماءٌ (water) and سَماءٌ (sky) the ء is part of the root, so those words behave normally and do take tanwīn - and ماءٌ, in spite of its shape, is masculine.

4. The unmarked feminines: a list to memorise. These nouns carry no feminine marker and are feminine anyway. There is no rule behind most of them, and there are not many, so learn them as a block. They fall into four groups:

• female beings: أُمٌّ، بِنْتٌ، أُخْتٌ, and women’s names with no ة - مَرْيَمُ، زَيْنَبُ، هِنْدُ، سُعادُ
• a fixed set of everyday nouns: شَمْسٌ، نارٌ، أَرْضٌ، دارٌ، ريحٌ، حَرْبٌ، نَفْسٌ
• body parts that come in pairs: يَدٌ، عَيْنٌ، رِجْلٌ، أُذُنٌ، قَدَمٌ، سِنٌّ. This is a strong tendency rather than a law, and it still pays for itself: most paired organs are feminine, and the single ones are masculine - أَنْفٌ، رَأْسٌ، فَمٌ، لِسانٌ، قَلْبٌ. The exceptions to note are حاجِبٌ (eyebrow) and مِرْفَقٌ (elbow), which come in pairs and are masculine anyway.
• names of countries and cities: مِصْرُ، دِمَشْقُ، بَغْدادُ، القاهِرَةُ، بَيْروتُ. City names are reliably feminine. A few country names go the other way and are treated as masculine - العِراقُ، السّودانُ، المَغْرِبُ، لُبْنانُ - so learn a country’s gender with its name.

5. The reverse trap: masculine nouns that end in ة. A ة on the end is strong evidence of feminine gender, not proof of it. Two groups end in ة while referring to men, and they take masculine agreement throughout:

• titles and intensive descriptions: خَليفَةٌ (caliph), عَلّامَةٌ (great scholar), رَحّالَةٌ (great traveller). The ة here is an old intensifier - it makes the description stronger, not female.
• men’s given names: حَمْزَةُ، أُسامَةُ، طَلْحَةُ، مُعاوِيَةُ. These are men, so everything that agrees with them is masculine: حَمْزَةُ كَريمٌ, never *حَمْزَةُ كَريمَةٌ.

The lesson to take from points 4 and 5 together: gender is a property of the word, and the ending is a very good clue to it, not a definition of it. When the two disagree, meaning wins.

6. Gender surfaces in four places. The noun by itself rarely gives you trouble. What gives you trouble is everything that has to match it:

• the adjective follows its noun and copies its gender: وَلَدٌ صَغيرٌ / بِنْتٌ صَغيرَةٌ، بَيْتٌ جَديدٌ / سَيّارَةٌ جَديدَةٌ. Full details in lesson 8.
• the pronoun: هُوَ for a masculine noun, هِيَ for a feminine one - and this holds for objects too, so a book is هُوَ and a car is هِيَ. Lesson 6.
• the demonstrative: هٰذا كِتابٌ / هٰذِهِ مَدْرَسَةٌ. Lesson 13.
• the verb: the present-tense prefix changes, يَكْتُبُ for he and تَكْتُبُ for she - الوَلَدُ يَقْرَأُ / البِنْتُ تَقْرَأُ. Lessons 14 and 23.

This is why the memorised lists matter so much. Getting شَمْسٌ wrong is not one mistake; it is a mistake repeated in every adjective, pronoun and verb that points back at it.

7. How ة is pronounced. The letter is a ه wearing the two dots of a ت, and it behaves like both, depending on what follows it.

• In pause - when the word ends the utterance and you drop the case ending, which is what people actually do in speech, and what the pronunciation guide calls the pausal form - the ت is not heard at all. You hear only the fatḥa in front of it: مَدينَة.
• With a case ending or a tanwīn on it, the ت is fully pronounced, and the ending follows it: مَدينَةٌ، مَدينَةً، مَدينَةٍ. This is one reason the vowel marks in this path are printed on every word - they are the only thing that tells you whether the ت is spoken.
• Before an attached pronoun, the ة is rewritten as a plain ت and pronounced: سَيّارَةٌ becomes سَيّارَتي; مَدينَةٌ becomes مَدينَتُهُ. Lesson 7.
• As the first term of an إِضافَة, the ت is always pronounced, even at a pause, because the word is not finished: مَدينَةُ القاهِرَةِ، سَيّارَةُ المُدَرِّسِ، غُرْفَةُ الطَّعامِ. This is the classic giveaway that a speaker has understood the construction (lesson 20).

8. Writing ة correctly. It is always word-final; it never begins or sits inside a word, and it never joins to a following letter. The two dots are obligatory: مَدْرَسَةٌ is a school, مَدْرَسَه is nothing. Leaving the dots off is a widespread habit in casual typing and an outright error in written Arabic, so form the habit now. Note also that the accusative tanwīn on a ة takes no extra alif: مَدينَةً, not *مَدينَةًا (lesson 4).

9. Flagged, not taught: plurals. Everything above is about the singular. Arabic plurals do something that will look bizarre from here - the plural of a non-human noun is treated as feminine singular, so الكُتُبُ جَديدَةٌ is correct for “the books are new”, with a feminine adjective on a masculine noun. Do not try to reason it out now, and do not let it shake the singular rules. Lessons 9 to 15 build it up properly.

Forms & patterns

The three feminine endings, each against its masculine partner:

Ordinary pairs built with ة - nouns for people, then adjectives:

A few pairs use two unrelated words instead of an ending:

Feminine without any marker - the list to memorise:

Masculine in spite of the ة:

Where the gender becomes visible:

The ة and its four environments:

Examples

Common mistakes

• بِنْتٌ جَميلٌ -> بِنْتٌ جَميلَةٌ - the noun carries no ة, but it is feminine, and the adjective must show that. Never let the shape of the noun decide the adjective for you.
• الشَّمْسُ حارٌّ -> الشَّمْسُ حارَّةٌ - شَمْسٌ heads the memorised list of unmarked feminines. The same goes for أَرْضٌ، نارٌ، ريحٌ، حَرْبٌ.
• هٰذا بِنْتٌ -> هٰذِهِ بِنْتٌ - the demonstrative agrees just as the adjective does, so an unmarked feminine noun still takes هٰذِهِ.
• الخَليفَةُ العادِلَةُ (of a man) -> الخَليفَةُ العادِلُ - خَليفَةٌ ends in ة and is masculine. The ة on it is an intensifier, not a gender mark.
• أُسامَةُ ذَهَبَتْ إِلَى السّوقِ -> أُسامَةُ ذَهَبَ إِلَى السّوقِ - a man’s name in ة takes a masculine verb. Meaning outranks spelling every time.
• مَدْرَسَه -> مَدْرَسَةٌ - write the two dots. ة and ه are different letters, and dropping the dots turns a school into nothing at all.
• صَحْراءٌ واسِعَةٌ -> صَحْراءُ واسِعَةٌ - a word ending in the feminine ـاء takes no tanwīn. The single ḍamma is its full and correct ending.
• كُبْرًى -> كُبْرى - the same applies to the feminine ـى: no tanwīn, and nothing is written above the alif maqṣūra.
• مِصْرُ جَميلٌ -> مِصْرُ جَميلَةٌ - city names, and most country names, are feminine, however masculine the word looks.
• مَدينَه القاهِرَةِ -> مَدينَةُ القاهِرَةِ - in an إِضافَة the first word is not at a pause, so its ة is written properly and its ت is pronounced, followed by the case ending.

Tips

• Never store a noun on its own. Store it with a matching adjective - شَمْسٌ حارَّةٌ، بَيْتٌ كَبيرٌ - and the gender comes back with the word instead of being guessed at.
• The exception list is genuinely short. Fifteen or so unmarked feminines and half a dozen masculines in ة cover almost everything you will meet before B1. Spend one sitting on them.
• Use the body rule as a real shortcut: if the organ comes in a pair it is feminine, if there is only one of it, it is masculine. It works often enough to be worth trusting.
• When you meet a new word ending in ة, ask what it refers to before you assume. A person? Then the ة almost certainly marks a woman. A man, or a title of a man? Then it does not.
• Say every ة word twice out loud: once in pause and once with its ending. That single habit builds the reflex you need for the إِضافَة later.
• If a dictionary entry looks masculine but a text keeps giving it feminine adjectives, believe the text - you have found one of the unmarked feminines.
• Ignore plurals completely for now, including anything you notice about feminine adjectives on plural objects. That belongs to lessons 9 to 15 and will only muddle the singular.
• Do not hunt for logic in شَمْسٌ or حَرْبٌ. Gender assignment for non-living things is history, not meaning, and a learner’s time is better spent on the list than on the reason.

In short

English has one word for “you” and one for “they”. Arabic has five of the first and three of the second. The independent personal pronouns - الضَّمائِرُ المُنْفَصِلَةُ - sort every person by gender and by number, and Arabic counts in three numbers, not two: one, exactly two, and three or more. That gives twelve words where English gets by with seven, and all twelve have to be learned, because the choice is not a matter of style or politeness. Saying أَنْتَ to a woman is not formal or old-fashioned; it is simply wrong, the way “she is my brother” is wrong.

The consolation is that this is the easiest paradigm in the language. These twelve words never change their shape: no case endings, no tanwīn, no plural of a plural. Learn them once and they are done. Better still, the endings you meet here - ـتَ against ـتِ، ـمْ against ـنَّ، ـما for two

• are the same signals that will come back on the attached pronouns of lesson 7 and on every verb you ever conjugate. This is the paradigm that teaches you the shape of all the others.

The rule

1. “Independent” means it is a word of its own. Arabic keeps two families of pronouns. A ضَميرٌ مُنْفَصِلٌ stands alone with a space on each side, like any other word: هُوَ طالِبٌ. A ضَميرٌ مُتَّصِلٌ is glued onto the end of another word and cannot be said by itself: the ـي of كِتابي “my book”, the ـكَ of بَيْتُكَ “your house”. Those are lesson 7. This lesson is the free family only - the pronouns you use to start a sentence.

2. Three persons, three numbers, two genders - but the grid is not full. Three persons times three numbers times two genders would be eighteen cells. Arabic fills twelve of them, and the gaps are worth knowing in advance:

• the first person makes no gender distinction at all - أَنا is said by a man and by a woman;
• the first person has no dual - two speakers use نَحْنُ, exactly as thirty would;
• the two duals, أَنْتُما and هُما, each cover both genders.

So gender only ever matters in the second and third persons, and only outside the dual.

3. The first person: أَنا and نَحْنُ. أَنا is “I”, نَحْنُ is “we”. Nothing about the speaker’s gender is visible in either, which is why a written أَنا مُتْعَبٌ tells you the speaker is male - not from the pronoun, but from the adjective at the other end of the sentence.

4. The second person: five forms. أَنْتَ to one man, أَنْتِ to one woman, أَنْتُما to any two people, أَنْتُمْ to three or more men (or to a mixed group), أَنْتُنَّ to three or more women. A group of women plus a single man is أَنْتُمْ: in Arabic the masculine plural is the default for mixed company. The choice is by gender and number only, not by politeness: there is no ordinary “polite you” the way French has vous, and أَنْتَ or أَنْتِ is what you say to one person whatever their rank. Very formal correspondence does address a single official in the plural, but it does so through a courtesy noun - سِيادَتُكُمْ، سَعادَتُكُمْ - rather than by putting أَنْتُمْ in front of one person in ordinary prose.

5. The third person: five forms, and no word for “it”. هُوَ، هِيَ، هُما، هُمْ، هُنَّ line up exactly like the second person. English “it” has no equivalent, because Arabic has no neuter: a thing is referred to by the gender its noun happens to have (lesson 5). الْكِتابُ is masculine, so a book is هُوَ; السَّيّارَةُ is feminine, so a car is هِيَ. And one rule you will meet properly in lesson 11: a plural of non-human things is referred to with the feminine singular هِيَ, not with هُمْ. Books, on their own, are هِيَ.

6. أَنْتَ and أَنْتِ differ by a single ḥaraka. The masculine ends in fatḥa, the feminine in kasra. Nothing else about the word changes - the consonants are the same three letters أ، ن، ت in both. In ordinary Arabic writing, where the vowel marks are not printed, the two are therefore the same word on the page, and only the context tells you which one is meant. Usually the rest of the sentence gives it away, because the predicate agrees: the reading “you are a teacher” is settled by مُدَرِّسٌ or مُدَرِّسَةٌ standing after it. In speech there is no ambiguity at all - you hear the ending. The same one-vowel contrast runs through the whole language: ـكَ against ـكِ on nouns (lesson 7), ـتَ against ـتِ on past-tense verbs (lesson 18). Wherever that pair turns up in the second person singular, fatḥa is the masculine and kasra the feminine - which is a rule about this one slot, not about the two vowels in general.

7. Pronouns are مَبْنِيَّةٌ: their ending is frozen. Lesson 3 sorted words into those whose final vowel changes with the job they do in the sentence (مُعْرَبٌ) and those whose ending is fixed for life (مَبْنِيٌّ). Every pronoun belongs to the second group. هُوَ is هُوَ whether it is the subject of the sentence, part of the predicate, or standing alone as an answer. Two practical consequences: never put tanwīn on a pronoun, and never “change the case” of one. Where an English speaker expects a shift from “he” to “him”, Arabic switches to a different family of pronouns altogether (lessons 7 and 34), rather than re-inflecting هُوَ.

8. Two points of spelling and linking. First, أَنا ends in a written alif that is normally not read as a long vowel: in the flow of speech the word is two light syllables and the alif is a spelling convention only. (Only in pause, at a full stop, is that final vowel drawn out - the pausal form, which the pronunciation guide covers.) Note also that it opens with هَمْزَةُ القَطْعِ, so the first letter must be written أ, never a bare alif. Second, أَنْتُمْ and هُمْ end in a sukūn, and a sukūn cannot be followed by the sukūn of the article’s ل. When one of these two pronouns is followed directly by a word with الـ - or by any other word opening with هَمْزَةُ الوَصْلِ - the م takes a ḍamma to bridge the gap: هُمُ الْمُدَرِّسونَ، أَنْتُمُ الْفائِزونَ. This is pronunciation, not a change of form - the pronoun is still هُمْ.

9. The main use: a pronoun as المُبْتَدَأ. Lesson 2 built the nominal sentence out of a definite first half and an indefinite second half. A pronoun is inherently definite (lesson 4 listed it among the words that refuse الـ), so it drops straight into the first slot:

• أَنا طالِبٌ. - “I am a student.”
• هِيَ مُدَرِّسَةٌ. - “She is a teacher.”
• نَحْنُ مِنْ مِصْرَ. - “We are from Egypt.”
• هُمْ عَرَبٌ. - “They are Arabs.”

There is still no verb “to be” anywhere in these sentences; the English “am/is/are” corresponds to the silence after the pronoun. The predicate agrees with the pronoun in gender and number, so أَنْتِ selects مُدَرِّسَةٌ and هُمْ selects a masculine plural. In نَحْنُ مِنْ مِصْرَ the predicate is a preposition plus a noun rather than a single word - lesson 17 comes back to that type - and مِصْرَ ends in a fatḥa where you would expect a kasra after مِنْ, because it belongs to a class of nouns that decline differently. Take that on trust until lesson 41; the same is true of لُبْنانَ، بَيْروتَ، أَحْمَدَ.

10. ضَميرُ الفَصْلِ: the pronoun that keeps a sentence a sentence. Lesson 2’s rule was that definite + indefinite makes a statement, while definite + definite makes a phrase. So what do you do when the predicate really is definite - when you want to say not “Muhammad is a manager” but “Muhammad is the manager”? Put مُحَمَّدٌ الْمُديرُ on the page and it reads as a label, “Muhammad the manager”. Arabic solves this by dropping a third-person pronoun between the two halves:

• مُحَمَّدٌ هُوَ الْمُديرُ. - “Muhammad is the manager.”
• فاطِمَةُ هِيَ الْمُديرَةُ. - “Fatima is the manager.”
• الطُّلّابُ هُمُ الْفائِزونَ. - “The students are the winners.”

That pronoun is called ضَميرُ الفَصْلِ, “the pronoun of separation”. It agrees with the first half in gender and number, it carries no case ending of its own, and it adds a shade of exclusivity - Muhammad and no one else. It is not a copula. Its job is to stop a definite predicate from being read as an attribute, so it belongs between two definite halves and nowhere else at this level. With an ordinary indefinite predicate there is nothing to disambiguate and it is left out: الْبَيْتُ كَبيرٌ stays as it is, and الْبَيْتُ هُوَ كَبيرٌ is not how the sentence is said.

11. With a verb, the pronoun usually disappears. This lesson is about nominal sentences, but a word of warning for the ones ahead. An Arabic verb already spells out its own subject in its prefixes and suffixes: كَتَبْتُ can only mean “I wrote”, كَتَبوا can only mean “they wrote”. The pronoun is therefore left out unless you want emphasis or contrast - أَنا كَتَبْتُ الرِّسالَةَ, “I wrote the letter (not him)”. Beginners coming from English attach a pronoun to every verb out of habit, and it makes the Arabic sound insistent and odd. Lessons 14 and 22 build the verb paradigms; keep the pronouns for nominal sentences and for emphasis.

12. What this lesson deliberately leaves out. Two further sets of pronouns exist. The attached possessive endings ـي، ـكَ، ـهُ and their relatives are lesson 7. A second independent set, built on إِيّا (إِيّايَ، إِيّاكَ، إِيّاهُ), exists for object position when nothing else can carry the pronoun; it is rare in modern prose and belongs with the direct object in lesson 29. Until then, treat the twelve words below as the whole story.

Forms & patterns

The full set, arranged the way Arabic grammars arrange it - by person down the side, by number across the top. Learn the grid as a shape, not as a list:

Counting distinct words rather than cells, that is twelve: أَنا، نَحْنُ، أَنْتَ، أَنْتِ، أَنْتُما، أَنْتُمْ، أَنْتُنَّ، هُوَ، هِيَ، هُما، هُمْ، هُنَّ.

The same twelve against their English coverage, which is where the mismatch shows:

The two forms that are identical on paper without vowel marks, and the predicate that resolves them:

And the endings themselves, which are worth seeing stripped of everything else, because they recur across the whole language:

Examples

Common mistakes

• انا طالِبٌ. -> أَنا طالِبٌ. - the word opens with هَمْزَةُ القَطْعِ, so the alif must carry its hamza. A bare alif here is a spelling error, not a shortcut.
• أَنْتَ مُدَرِّسَةٌ. -> أَنْتِ مُدَرِّسَةٌ. - أَنْتَ is masculine only. Addressing a woman with it is an error of grammar, not of register, and the mismatched predicate makes it obvious.
• هُمْ طالِبانِ. -> هُما طالِبانِ. - for exactly two, Arabic has its own number. هُمْ starts at three. The dual is compulsory, never a stylistic option.
• هُنَّ مُدَرِّسَتانِ. -> هُما مُدَرِّسَتانِ. - the same trap on the feminine side: two women are هُما, because both duals are gender-neutral.
• نَحْنانِ مِنَ الْمَغْرِبِ. -> نَحْنُ مِنَ الْمَغْرِبِ. - there is no first-person dual to build. Two speakers say نَحْنُ.
• أَنْتُنَّ مُوَظَّفونَ. -> أَنْتُمْ مُوَظَّفونَ. - أَنْتُنَّ is for a group of women only. One man in the room and the whole group is addressed with the masculine plural.
• الْبَيْتُ هُوَ كَبيرٌ. -> الْبَيْتُ كَبيرٌ. - هُوَ is not the verb “is”. The separating pronoun appears only when the predicate is definite; with an indefinite predicate the two halves sit side by side in silence.
• مُحَمَّدٌ الْمُديرُ. (meaning “Muhammad is the manager”) -> مُحَمَّدٌ هُوَ الْمُديرُ. - two definite halves with nothing between them read as a phrase, “Muhammad the manager”. Insert the pronoun to make it a statement.
• هُوٌ طالِبٌ. -> هُوَ طالِبٌ. - pronouns are مَبْنِيَّةٌ: no tanwīn, ever, and no case ending to adjust. Only the noun after it declines.
• الْمَكْتَبُ كَبيرٌ، وهِيَ جَديدَةٌ. -> الْمَكْتَبُ كَبيرٌ، وهُوَ جَديدٌ. - do not reach for هِيَ because English said “it”. The pronoun follows the gender of the Arabic noun, and مَكْتَبٌ is masculine.

Tips

• Chant the twelve in this fixed order: أَنا، نَحْنُ / أَنْتَ، أَنْتِ، أَنْتُما، أَنْتُمْ، أَنْتُنَّ / هُوَ، هِيَ، هُما، هُمْ، هُنَّ. It is the order the paradigm tables in these lessons use, so the effort is repaid at lesson 14 and again at lesson 18. (Arabic grammars of the traditional kind run the other way round, from الغائِب to المُتَكَلِّم, so do not be thrown when a table you meet elsewhere starts at هُوَ.)
• Learn the five endings rather than twelve separate words: ـما means two, ـمْ means many men, ـنَّ means many women. Those three signals cover six of the twelve forms.
• Fix fatḥa = masculine, kasra = feminine in your ear now. That single pair decides أَنْتَ against أَنْتِ here, ـكَ against ـكِ in lesson 7, and ـتَ against ـتِ in lesson 18.
• Whenever you meet a new noun, decide immediately whether it is a هُوَ or a هِيَ. Storing the gender with the word costs nothing now and saves every later agreement.
• Practise with real pairs of people around you. The dual feels artificial until you have said هُما once about two actual friends; after that it stops being a grammar item.
• Do not look for a word meaning “it”, and do not look for a polite “you” for everyday use. Neither exists as a pronoun of its own, and hunting for them produces sentences no Arab writes.
• Ignore for now the إِيّا pronouns and everything about pronoun objects. In this lesson a pronoun only ever stands at the front of a nominal sentence, or between its two halves.
• When reading unvocalized text, do not stop at أ ن ت wondering which “you” it is - read on. The adjective or noun after it almost always settles the question.

In short

English owns things with a separate little word in front: “my book”, “her car”. Arabic owns them with an ending glued to the back of the noun: كِتابي، سَيّارَتُها. There is no space, no apostrophe and no extra word - the pronoun becomes part of the noun, and the noun grows a syllable or two. The previous lesson gave you the free-standing pronouns أَنا، أَنْتَ، هُوَ; this lesson gives you their attached twins, which are the forms you will actually write most of the time.

Two consequences follow immediately, and they are what makes this lesson worth reading twice. First, a noun carrying one of these endings is already definite - “my book” is a particular book - so it refuses الـ and it refuses tanwīn. Second, the very same endings attach to prepositions: لَهُ، مِنْهُ، عَلَيْها، مَعَنا. Learn the set once and you have covered nouns and prepositions together, with only small, predictable adjustments at the seam.

The rule

1. Twelve endings, one set. Arabic has an attached pronoun for every person that the independent pronouns cover: ـي، ـكَ، ـكِ، ـهُ، ـها، ـنا، ـكُما، ـكُمْ، ـكُنَّ، ـهُما، ـهُمْ، ـهُنَّ. They are written joined to the host word, never separated by a space, and the host keeps its own vowelling in front of them: كِتابُكَ is one word of four syllables. Notice the internal logic - ك means “you” throughout, ه means “he / she / they”, ن means “us”, ي means “me”. Everything after that first consonant is just the number-and-gender tail you already met on the independent pronouns.

2. ـي swallows the case ending. Eleven of the twelve endings sit on top of the noun’s normal final vowel: كِتابُ + كَ = كِتابُكَ, with the ḍamma still audible. The first-person ـي is different. It takes the last consonant of the noun for itself, and the case ending disappears underneath it:

• كِتابٌ / الكِتابُ → كِتابي - never *كِتابُي، never *كِتابٌي
• بَيْتٌ → بَيْتي، صَديقٌ → صَديقي، اِسْمٌ → اِسْمي

The result is invariable. Whatever the sentence does with the word, “my book” stays كِتابي: كِتابي جَديدٌ (subject), قَرَأْتُ كِتابي (object), فِي كِتابي (after a preposition). That is one form to learn instead of three, so the most useful ending in the language is also the easiest.

3. A suffixed noun is definite - no الـ, no tanwīn. This is the rule beginners break most often. The ending points at a specific owner, which makes the noun specific, so the two ordinary markers of definiteness and indefiniteness are both blocked:

• الكِتابي is impossible - the article and the suffix cannot share a word
• كِتابٌي and كِتابًكَ are impossible - tanwīn cannot survive a suffix

An adjective describing such a noun must agree in definiteness, and since the noun is definite the adjective takes الـ: كِتابي الجَديدُ “my new book”, سَيّارَتُها الحَمْراءُ “her red car”. Drop that article and you have changed a phrase into a sentence: كِتابي جَديدٌ means “my book is new”. Both are correct Arabic; only one of them is what you meant. (Definiteness itself is lesson 4; adjectives are lesson 8.)

If you really do want an indefinite “a book of mine”, Arabic does not use a suffix on the noun at all - it says كِتابٌ لي, keeping the tanwīn and putting the pronoun on a preposition instead.

4. ة becomes ت. The tied tāʾ marbūṭa exists only at the very end of a word. The moment anything is added behind it, it unties into an ordinary ت and takes the case vowel normally:

• سَيّارَةٌ → سَيّارَتي، سَيّارَتُكَ، سَيّارَتُها
• مُعَلِّمَةٌ → مُعَلِّمَتُهُ، غُرْفَةٌ → غُرْفَتُنا، مَدْرَسَةٌ → مَدْرَسَتُهُمْ

Write *سَيّارَةي and you have written a letter that cannot occur in that position. This same untying will come back in the إِضافَة (lesson 20), so it is worth fixing now.

5. The host keeps its own case. The suffix does not freeze the noun. Whatever ending the sentence calls for is still there, sitting between the noun and the suffix:

• كِتابُهُ جَديدٌ - subject, so مَرْفوع
• قَرَأْتُ كِتابَهُ - object, so مَنْصوب
• فِي كِتابِهِ - after a preposition, so مَجْرور

Three different words, one meaning. In unvocalized writing all three are spelled كتابه, so only the context tells you which one is meant. Speech is kinder here than the page: the suffix shelters the case vowel, so even when you stop at the end of a sentence and drop the last vowel - كِتابُهْ، كِتابَهْ، كِتابِهْ - the three stay apart, even in the pausal form. So this distinction is real grammar that the writing hides - which is exactly why this path prints every vowel.

6. هُ harmonizes to هِ. The third-person endings that begin with ه change their vowel when what comes immediately before them is a kasra, a long ī, or the diphthong ay. The ḍamma flips to a kasra to match:

• بِ + هُ = بِهِ، في + هُ = فيهِ، عَلى + هُ = عَلَيْهِ
• كِتابِ + هُ = كِتابِهِ، فِي بَيْتِهِمْ، مِنْ مُعَلِّمَتِهِنَّ

All four ه-forms behave this way: هُ → هِ، هُما → هِما، هُمْ → هِمْ، هُنَّ → هِنَّ. After a fatḥa, a ḍamma, a long ā or a sukūn, they keep the ḍamma: كِتابُهُ، كِتابَهُ، مِنْهُمْ، عِنْدَهُنَّ. This is pure sound harmony - the tongue stays where it already is - and once you notice it you will stop having to think about it.

7. The same endings on prepositions. Prepositions take the identical set - and so do مَعَ and عِنْدَ, which are strictly ظُروف rather than حُروف جَرّ (lesson 16) but carry the endings in exactly the same way. Preposition plus pronoun is written as one word:

• لِ (to, for): لي، لَكَ، لَهُ، لَها، لَنا، لَكُمْ، لَهُمْ
• بِ (with, by): بي، بِكَ، بِهِ، بِها، بِنا، بِكُمْ، بِهِمْ
• مَعَ (with): مَعي، مَعَكَ، مَعَهُ، مَعَنا، مَعَكُمْ
• عِنْدَ (at, by): عِنْدي، عِنْدَكَ، عِنْدَهُ، عِنْدَنا

Four seams need attention, and they are all small:

• مِنْ and عَنْ double their ن before ـي and ـنا: مِنّي، مِنّا، عَنّي، عَنّا. With every other ending they are unchanged: مِنْكَ، مِنْهُ، عَنْها، عَنْكُمْ.
• لِ switches its kasra to a fatḥa in front of every ending except ـي: لَكَ، لَهُ، لَنا، لَهُنَّ - but لي, where the lām keeps its original kasra.
• عَلى and إِلى turn their final ى back into a ي: عَلَيْكَ، عَلَيْها، إِلَيْنا، إِلَيْهِمْ. With the first person the two yāʾs fuse into one doubled letter: عَلَيَّ، إِلَيَّ.
• في does the same in the first person only: فِيَّ, against plain فيكَ، فيهِ، فينا.

8. What this lesson is not. Three neighbouring topics use the same endings or the same idea, and each has its own lesson. Attaching a pronoun to a verb to say “he saw me, I asked him” is lesson 29 - the set is nearly identical, with one difference worth waiting for. Owning something by putting two nouns together - بابُ الْبَيْتِ, “the door of the house” - is the إِضافَة, lesson 20. And saying “I have a car” with عِنْدي or لي is lesson 17. Here we stay with the plain suffix on a noun or a preposition.

9. Flags for later. A dual host and a sound masculine plural host both drop their final ن before a suffix (كِتابانِ → كِتاباهُ، مُعَلِّمونَ → مُعَلِّموهُ); meet the forms in lessons 12 and 13 and the mechanism in lesson 40. A small group of very common nouns - أَبٌ، أَخٌ and their like - stretch the case vowel into a long letter before a suffix: أَبوهُ، أَخوهُ، أَباهُ، أَبيهِ. The one you need today is the harmless first person: أَبي “my father”, أَخي “my brother”.

Forms & patterns

The full set on a masculine noun in the nominative. The dual rows are printed for completeness - recognize them, but expect to use the other ten far more often.

Nouns ending in ة, across four of the endings. The pattern is the same for all twelve:

The host’s own case ending survives underneath the suffix - and drags the ه-forms with it:

The endings on five common prepositions:

And on the four that reshape themselves at the seam:

The dual slots into both preposition tables exactly where you would expect: لَكُما، لَهُما، مِنْكُما، مِنْهُما، عَلَيْكُما، عَلَيْهِما، فيكُما، فيهِما.

Examples

Common mistakes

• كِتابُي -> كِتابي - the first-person ي takes the last consonant for itself and the case vowel vanishes. There is no ḍamma to write.
• الكِتابي -> كِتابي - a suffix already makes the noun definite, so الـ has nothing left to do. One definiteness marker per word.
• بَيْتٌكَ -> بَيْتُكَ - tanwīn cannot stand in front of a suffix either. The doubled sign becomes a single case vowel.
• سَيّارَةي -> سَيّارَتي - ة exists only word-finally. Add anything behind it and it unties into ت.
• كِتابي جَديدٌ (meaning “my new book”) -> كِتابي الجَديدُ - the noun is definite, so the adjective needs الـ. Without it you have written the full sentence “my book is new”.
• بِهُ / فيهُ / عَلَيْهُ -> بِهِ / فيهِ / عَلَيْهِ - after a kasra, a long ī or ay, the ه-endings take a kasra to match.
• فِي كِتابُهُ -> فِي كِتابِهِ - the preposition still governs the noun underneath the suffix, and that kasra then pulls هُ down to هِ as well.
• مِنْي / عَنْي -> مِنّي / عَنّي - the ن of مِنْ and عَنْ doubles before ـي and ـنا. Same for مِنّا، عَنّا.
• عَلَيْي / إِلَيْي -> عَلَيَّ / إِلَيَّ - the two yāʾs merge into one letter with a shadda, and the fatḥa before them stays.
• لِكَ / لِهُمْ -> لَكَ / لَهُمْ - لِ takes a fatḥa in front of every ending but ـي.
• كِتاب أَنا -> كِتابي - the independent pronouns of lesson 6 never mark possession. That job belongs to the attached set only.

Tips

• Chant one noun straight through all twelve: كِتابي، كِتابُكَ، كِتابُكِ، كِتابُهُ، كِتابُها… Then do it again with سَيّارَة so the ة → ت switch becomes automatic rather than remembered.
• Hook the consonants, not the whole endings: ك = “you”, ه = “he / she / they”, ن = “we”, ي = “me”. The rest of each ending is the same tail you learned on the independent pronouns.
• Two of the twelve are duals. Learn to recognize ـكُما and ـهُما in reading; you can leave producing them until lesson 12.
• Before you write الـ on any noun, check whether it already ends in a suffix. If it does, stop - the word is finished.
• Read كِتابُهُ، كِتابَهُ، كِتابِهِ aloud as a set. The vowel harmony of هُ / هِ is easier to hear than to memorize.
• Ordinary Arabic prints كتابه with no vowels at all, so context - not the spelling - tells you the case. Do not let that worry you; that is what the pronunciation guide’s lesson on reading unvocalized text is for.
• Ignore for now what happens when the host is a dual or a sound masculine plural, and ignore the pronoun-on-a-verb set entirely. Both arrive later with their own lessons.
• The prepositions are worth over-learning early: لي، لَهُ، مَعَهُ، عِنْدَها، مِنْهُمْ، عَلَيْكُمْ turn up in every conversation, and they never change afterwards.

In short

English puts the adjective in front of its noun and then leaves it alone: “a big house”, “the big house”, “in a big house” - “big” never changes shape. Arabic does the opposite on both counts. The adjective comes after the noun, and it copies it: بَيْتٌ كَبيرٌ, literally “a house, a big one”. Arabic grammar calls the adjective النَّعْت, the describer, and the noun it hangs on المَنْعوت, the described. The نَعْت is a follower: it repeats the noun’s gender, its number, its definiteness and its case, so almost every adjective you write ends in the same sound as the word before it.

Of those four, the one that decides what your two words actually mean is definiteness. Put الـ on both and you have a phrase: البَيْتُ الكَبيرُ, “the big house” - a label, not yet a statement. Put it on the first word only and you have the nominal sentence of lesson 2: البَيْتُ كَبيرٌ, “the house is big”. Three letters of difference, and one of them is a whole sentence. Learn the pair together from the first day and this stops being a trap.

The rule

1. The adjective comes second, always. In Modern Standard Arabic the نَعْت stands after its noun. There is no version of the phrase with the adjective in front, and in the phrases of this lesson the two words sit side by side - the one thing that regularly comes between them is an إِضافَة, which waits for lesson 20:

• بَيْتٌ كَبيرٌ - a big house
• كِتابٌ جَديدٌ - a new book
• مَدينَةٌ جَميلَةٌ - a beautiful city

*كَبيرٌ بَيْتٌ is not a “poetic” order or a rare one. It is not a phrase at all - a reader would try to parse it as a sentence, “a big one is a house”, and give up.

2. Four things get copied. The نَعْت matches its noun in:

• gender - مُذَكَّر or مُؤَنَّث
• number - singular, dual or plural
• definiteness - both bare, or both with الـ
• case - مَرْفوع، مَنْصوب، مَجْرور

Number is on the list for completeness; in this lesson every noun is singular, so there is nothing to do with it yet. Plurals bring a genuine surprise (lesson 11) and the dual has its own endings (lesson 12). For now, three boxes to tick.

3. Gender: the feminine adjective takes ة. Nearly every adjective you meet at A1 forms its feminine by adding ـة to the masculine, exactly like the nouns of lesson 5:

• الوَلَدُ الصَّغيرُ - the small boy
• البِنْتُ الصَّغيرَةُ - the small girl

What the adjective copies is the noun’s grammatical gender, not what the thing is. A noun that is feminine without any ة still takes a feminine adjective: شَمْسٌ حارَّةٌ، يَدٌ صَغيرَةٌ. Look the gender up once, store it with the word, and the adjective follows automatically.

One honest exception to flag and then ignore: a small family of adjectives on the pattern أَفْعَل - colours and physical traits - makes its feminine differently and takes no tanwīn at all: أَحْمَرُ / حَمْراءُ، أَبْيَضُ / بَيْضاءُ. They belong with the special declension classes of lesson 41. Everything in this lesson uses the ordinary ة.

4. Definiteness: both, or neither. This is the rule that carries the lesson. A نَعْت and its مَنْعوت must agree on definiteness, and there are exactly two legal shapes:

• both indefinite: بَيْتٌ كَبيرٌ - a big house
• both definite: البَيْتُ الكَبيرُ - the big house

A mixed pair is broken Arabic. *بَيْتٌ الكَبيرُ says nothing in any reading - not “a big house”, not “the big house”, not a sentence. It ranks with writing الـ and tanwīn on the same word among the commonest beginner errors.

5. Case: the adjective echoes, it does not choose. Whatever the sentence does to the noun, the adjective wears the same ending - including the tanwīn when the noun is indefinite:

• مَرْفوع: البَيْتُ الكَبيرُ قَريبٌ. - the phrase is the subject
• مَنْصوب: رَأَيْتُ البَيْتَ الكَبيرَ. - the phrase is the object
• مَجْرور: سَكَنْتُ في بَيْتٍ كَبيرٍ. - the phrase follows a preposition

Notice that the case is decided for the phrase, by the sentence around it, and then applied twice. You never ask “what case should كَبير take?” - you ask what case the noun is in and copy it. This is why an adjective is a تابِع, a “follower”, in Arabic grammar.

6. The الـ test: phrase or sentence? Two words, one noun and one adjective, give three different results depending on where the article lands:

The third line is the nominal sentence of lesson 2, and it is built from the same two words. The mechanism is simple: a definite noun followed by an indefinite describing word is a claim about that noun, because the mismatch means the second word cannot be a follower. Make them match and the claim collapses back into a label.

Drill the pair back to back until it is automatic. المَدينَةُ الجَميلَةُ - the beautiful city. المَدينَةُ جَميلَةٌ - the city is beautiful. الدَّرْسُ السَّهْلُ - the easy lesson. الدَّرْسُ سَهْلٌ - the lesson is easy.

7. Definite without الـ: the suffix trap. Lesson 7 gave you كِتابي، بَيْتُكَ، سَيّارَتُها. Lesson 4 said that a noun carrying a possessive ending is already definite - and rule 4 does not care how the noun got that way. So the adjective still needs its الـ:

• كِتابي الجَديدُ - my new book
• بَيْتُكَ القَديمُ - your old house
• سَيّارَتُها الصَّغيرَةُ - her small car

Write *كِتابي جَديدٌ intending “my new book” and you have written a complete sentence instead: “My book is new.” The same switch as in rule 6, just with the definiteness coming from a suffix rather than from an article. Proper names are definite in their own right, so an adjective on a name also takes الـ: القاهِرَةُ القَديمَةُ, “Old Cairo”.

There is one more source of definiteness, the إِضافَة (بابُ البَيْتِ, “the door of the house”), where an adjective raises a question of which noun it describes. That construction is lesson 20 and the adjective question is handled there; do not build such phrases yet.

8. Two articles, two independent sun-letter decisions. Each الـ obeys the letter it happens to sit in front of, so one phrase can easily have one assimilated article and one pronounced one. Write the shadda, and leave the ل of a sun-letter article with no sign at all:

• البَيْتُ الكَبيرُ - moon, moon
• الطّالِبُ الجَديدُ - sun, moon
• المَدينَةُ الصَّغيرَةُ - moon, sun
• الرَّجُلُ الطَّويلُ - sun, sun

9. Stacking adjectives. More than one describer simply lines up after the noun, and each one repeats the whole set of endings:

• بَيْتٌ كَبيرٌ جَديدٌ - a big new house
• البَيْتُ الكَبيرُ الجَديدُ - the big new house
• قِصَّةٌ قَصيرَةٌ وسَهْلَةٌ - a short and easy story

The وَ between two adjectives is optional; the old preference is to write it when the two qualities are far apart in meaning and to leave it out when they are close. Nothing about the agreement changes: whatever you did to the first adjective, do to the second.

10. Left for later. Plural agreement, including the rule that non-human plurals take a feminine singular adjective, is lessons 9-15; the dual is lesson 12. Adjectives made from place and people names (مِصْرِيٌّ، عَرَبِيٌّ) are the نِسْبَة of lesson 21 - they agree exactly like the ones here. “Bigger” and “the biggest” are a different word shape altogether, lesson 28. And an adjective can also land in the accusative as the predicate of كانَ (lesson 32) or as a حال (lesson 55). All of them run on the agreement you are learning now.

Forms & patterns

بَيْت (masculine) with كَبير - the full grid

مَدينَة (feminine) with كَبيرَة - the same grid, one ة heavier

What puts the phrase in each case

Stock adjectives - learn each row as one unit

Four of the definite forms - الصَّغيرُ، الطَّويلُ، السَّهْلُ، الصَّعْبُ - begin with a sun letter, so their ل is silent and the shadda is doing the work.

Phrase against sentence - drill these in pairs

When the noun is definite by a suffix, not by الـ

Examples

Common mistakes

• البَيْتُ كَبيرُ. -> البَيْتُ كَبيرٌ. (The house is big.) or البَيْتُ الكَبيرُ (the big house) - a bare ḍamma with neither الـ nor tanwīn is not a possible ending on this word. Decide whether you are making a claim or writing a label, and mark it.
• بَيْتٌ الكَبيرُ -> بَيْتٌ كَبيرٌ or البَيْتُ الكَبيرُ - definiteness must match on both words. A half-definite pair is not a phrase and not a sentence; it is nothing.
• كَبيرٌ بَيْتٌ -> بَيْتٌ كَبيرٌ - English order. The describing word never goes in front of the noun in Arabic.
• كِتابي جَديدٌ (meaning “my new book”) -> كِتابي الجَديدُ - the possessive ending has already made the noun definite, so the adjective must carry الـ. What you wrote is the sentence “My book is new.”
• المَدينَةُ الكَبيرُ -> المَدينَةُ الكَبيرَةُ - gender is copied too. A feminine noun takes the ة form of the adjective, even when the two words look nothing alike.
• في البَيْتِ الكَبيرُ -> في البَيْتِ الكَبيرِ - the preposition puts the whole phrase in the genitive, not just its first word. The adjective always wears the same ending.
• رَأَيْتُ بَيْتًا كَبيرٌ -> رَأَيْتُ بَيْتًا كَبيرًا - the copy includes the tanwīn. Indefinite accusative on the noun means indefinite accusative on the adjective, alif seat and all.
• سَيّارَةٌ جَديدَةً -> سَيّارَةٌ جَديدَةٌ - two different tanwīns in one phrase means one of them was not copied. Read the noun’s ending aloud before you write the adjective.
• الطالِبُ الجَديدُ -> الطّالِبُ الجَديدُ - ط is a sun letter: its ل is silent and takes no sign, and the ط carries a shadda. The second article sits on ج, a moon letter, and is pronounced normally.
• المَدينَةُ الجَميلَةُ. (meaning “the city is beautiful”) -> المَدينَةُ جَميلَةٌ. - with الـ on both words you have described a city, not said anything about one. The predicate stays indefinite.

Tips

• Learn every adjective as a pair, masculine and feminine together: كَبيرٌ / كَبيرَةٌ، صَعْبٌ / صَعْبَةٌ. Half an adjective is unusable, because half your nouns are feminine.
• Count the articles before you decide what you have written. Two الـ = a phrase. One الـ, on the first word only = a sentence. None = an indefinite phrase.
• Treat the adjective as an echo: say the noun with its full ending out loud, then say the adjective with that same ending. If the two do not rhyme, something is wrong.
• Write in that order too - noun first, complete with its ending, then the adjective. Choosing the adjective’s ending independently is what produces mismatches.
• The trap that survives longest is the already-definite noun: كِتابي، بَيْتُكَ، a name. Whenever the noun has a suffix, reach for الـ on the adjective automatically.
• Keep everything singular for now. If you need to describe more than one thing, wait for lessons 9-16 rather than guessing - the plural rules include one genuinely counter-intuitive case.
• Ignore “bigger” and “the biggest” as well. أَكْبَر is not built by adding anything to كَبير, and it agrees by different rules (lesson 28).
• A memory hook for the word order: read بَيْتٌ كَبيرٌ to yourself as “a house - a big one”. Once that phrasing feels natural, the Arabic order stops feeling backwards.

In short

Arabic has two regular ways of making a plural, and they are called “sound” - سالِم - because the singular survives inside them untouched. You add an ending and nothing else moves. One of them, ـونَ / ـينَ, is reserved for male human beings: مُعَلِّمٌ becomes مُعَلِّمونَ. The other one, ـات, replaces the feminine ة and is far more generous: مُعَلِّمَةٌ becomes مُعَلِّماتٌ, and so does سَيّارَةٌ, which is not a person at all. Between them these two endings cover a very large slice of the plurals you will need at A1, and they are the only plurals you can build yourself from the singular without looking anything up.

The reason to learn them together is that they behave the same way in one important respect and differ in another. Both have two endings covering three cases, not three endings - so each one collapses two cases into a single form - and it is the same pair in both: the accusative merges into the genitive. The masculine plural uses one form for the subject and another for everything else; the feminine plural uses one form for the subject and another for everything else too, and that second form carries a kasra, never a fatḥa. رَأَيْتُ الطّالِباتِ is correct and *رَأَيْتُ الطّالِباتَ is not, no matter how much your ear wants the fatḥa of an object.

The rule

1. Three kinds of plural, two of them regular. Arabic builds plurals in three ways: the two sound plurals of this lesson, which glue an ending onto the intact singular, and the broken plural, which reshapes the word from the inside (كِتابٌ → كُتُبٌ). Broken plurals are lesson 10 and they are the commonest kind, so do not conclude from this lesson that Arabic pluralizes regularly. Conclude the narrower and more useful thing: when a word takes a sound plural, you can produce it on the spot.

2. جَمْعُ المُذَكَّرِ السّالِم: ـونَ for the subject, ـينَ for everything else. Take the singular exactly as it stands, remove its case ending, and attach the plural ending:

• مُعَلِّمٌ → مُعَلِّمونَ (مَرْفوع) / مُعَلِّمينَ (مَنْصوب and مَجْرور)
• مُهَنْدِسٌ → مُهَنْدِسونَ / مُهَنْدِسينَ
• مُدَرِّسٌ → مُدَرِّسونَ / مُدَرِّسينَ
• مُسْلِمٌ → مُسْلِمونَ / مُسْلِمينَ

Three things about the ending itself. The و and the ي are long vowels, so the endings are two full syllables and impossible to miss. The ن always carries a fatḥa - مُعَلِّمونَ, never *مُعَلِّمونُ. And this plural takes no tanwīn at all, in any case: the indefinite مُعَلِّمونَ and the definite المُعَلِّمونَ differ only by the article. That ن is doing the job tanwīn does elsewhere, which is why the two never appear together.

3. Who is allowed this plural. Two groups only:

• nouns for male human beings: مُعَلِّمٌ، مُهَنْدِسٌ، مُوَظَّفٌ، لاعِبٌ، مُواطِنٌ
• adjectives and participles describing male human beings: مَشْغولونَ، مُجْتَهِدونَ، مِصْرِيّونَ

Nothing else, apart from one short closed list: a few words borrow the ending without belonging to the class - the tens عِشْرونَ، ثَلاثونَ and odd nouns such as سِنونَ “years” and أَهْلونَ “family” - and grammar books file them separately as مُلْحَق بِجَمْعِ المُذَكَّرِ السّالِم, “annexed to” the sound masculine plural. Outside that list a book, a car, a table, a dog and a mountain are permanently excluded, and so is every feminine noun. *كِتابونَ and *سَيّارونَ are not clumsy Arabic, they are impossible Arabic.

Note the direction of the restriction carefully: being a male human makes a noun eligible, not obliged. Plenty of male-human nouns have a broken plural instead - رَجُلٌ → رِجالٌ، وَلَدٌ → أَوْلادٌ، طالِبٌ → طُلّابٌ. The words that reliably take ـونَ are the derived ones: participles of the derived and quadriliteral verb patterns, active (مُعَلِّم، مُهَنْدِس) and passive (مُوَظَّف) alike - lesson 53 - and nisba adjectives in ـِيّ (lesson 21). If a male-human noun is short and basic, expect a broken plural and check it in the dictionary.

4. جَمْعُ المُؤَنَّثِ السّالِم: drop the ة, add ـات. The recipe is mechanical:

• مُعَلِّمَةٌ → مُعَلِّماتٌ
• طالِبَةٌ → طالِباتٌ
• سَيّارَةٌ → سَيّاراتٌ
• لُغَةٌ → لُغاتٌ

The ة never survives - you cannot write *مُعَلِّمَةاتٌ - because ـات already contains the feminine ت, now standing on its own two feet as a full consonant. Nouns that have no ة to begin with simply take ـات as it is: اِمْتِحانٌ → اِمْتِحاناتٌ، حَيَوانٌ → حَيَواناتٌ.

5. Its two endings, and the trap that defines this lesson. The feminine plural does take tanwīn, so it has four shapes in all - but only two vowels:

• مَرْفوع: طالِباتٌ / الطّالِباتُ - ḍamma, as you would expect
• مَنْصوب: طالِباتٍ / الطّالِباتِ - kasra
• مَجْرور: طالِباتٍ / الطّالِباتِ - kasra, the same form again

The sound feminine plural never takes a fatḥa. Where any ordinary noun would show مَنْصوب with a fatḥa, this plural shows a kasra instead and looks identical to the genitive:

• رَأَيْتُ الطّالِباتِ - I saw the students (object, and still a kasra)
• رَأَيْتُ طالِباتٍ - I saw some students
• سَأَلْتُ المُعَلِّماتِ - I asked the teachers

*رَأَيْتُ الطّالِباتَ is wrong. This is not an exception in the sense of an oddity to be memorised blindly; it belongs to a small family of endings called العَلاماتُ الفَرْعِيَّة, “substitute markers”, where a case is signalled by something other than its usual vowel. Lesson 40 collects them. For now, one sentence is enough: for ـات, accusative borrows the genitive’s kasra.

6. What the ـات plural covers. Much more than the masculine one:

• female human beings: مُعَلِّماتٌ، طالِباتٌ، مُهَنْدِساتٌ، مُمَرِّضاتٌ
• things and abstractions, whatever their gender: سَيّاراتٌ، ساعاتٌ، كَلِماتٌ، لُغاتٌ، جامِعاتٌ، مَطاراتٌ

Covering is not the same as claiming, though: a ة on the singular no more guarantees ـات than being male guarantees ـونَ, and many everyday feminine nouns take a broken plural instead - مَدينَةٌ → مُدُنٌ، مَدْرَسَةٌ → مَدارِسُ.

This is also the living, productive plural of the language: new words, technical terms and borrowings usually take ـات rather than being fitted to a broken pattern. When you coin or import a noun and need it plural, ـات is the safe bet.

7. Agreement: with people, everything goes plural. Lesson 8 taught that an adjective copies its noun in definiteness, case and gender. Add number to that list. When the plural refers to human beings, the adjective is plural too:

• المُعَلِّمونَ الجُدُدُ - the new teachers (جُدُدٌ is the broken plural of جَديدٌ)
• المُعَلِّماتُ الجَديداتُ - the new female teachers (a sound plural adjective)
• مُهَنْدِسونَ مِصْرِيّونَ - Egyptian engineers

The same applies to the predicate of a nominal sentence, which is مَرْفوع and normally indefinite: المُوَظَّفونَ مَشْغولونَ، الطّالِباتُ مُجْتَهِداتٌ. And the pronoun that stands for such a plural is هُمْ for men and هُنَّ for women (lesson 6).

Notice that the adjective does not have to use the same plural as its noun. المُعَلِّمونَ is a sound plural, الجُدُدُ is a broken one; each word takes whichever plural it happens to have. What must match is the grammatical number, not the shape.

One flag, because it will trip you otherwise: this plural-agreement rule holds for humans. A plural of non-human things takes a feminine singular adjective - سَيّاراتٌ كَثيرَةٌ, not *سَيّاراتٌ كَثيراتٌ. That rule is the whole of lesson 11; here just register that the two cases are different.

8. The ن disappears in an إِضافَة. When a sound masculine plural is the first term of a possessive construct, its ن drops:

• المُعَلِّمونَ → مُعَلِّمو الْمَدْرَسَةِ - the school’s teachers
• المُعَلِّمينَ → مُعَلِّمي الْمَدْرَسَةِ - (object or after a preposition)

Two spelling points. The و of مُعَلِّمو is followed by nothing - no silent alif, unlike verb forms such as كَتَبوا. And the first term of a construct takes no article, so *المُعَلِّمو is impossible. The feminine plural keeps its ت and its case vowel in the same position and drops only the tanwīn, as any first term does: مُعَلِّماتُ الْمَدْرَسَةِ. When and why any of this happens is lesson 20; recognise the shape now so it does not look like a typo.

9. Which of these endings will you actually hear? This matters more than it sounds. In ordinary formal speech, final short vowels are dropped before a pause - the pausal form - so most case endings are silent.

• ـونَ and ـينَ: audible. What separates the two cases here is the long vowel و / ي inside the ending, not a final short vowel, so the contrast between مُعَلِّمونَ and مُعَلِّمينَ survives in real speech - even in pause, where the fatḥa on the ن does itself drop. This is one of the very few places in MSA where you can hear case with your ears.
• ـاتُ / ـاتِ / ـاتٌ / ـاتٍ: not audible at the end of a phrase. What you hear is plain ـات. The vowel returns as soon as another word follows and the phrase runs on.

So: get the masculine endings right because people will hear them, and get the feminine endings right because you will need them the moment you write.

10. What this lesson deliberately leaves out. Broken plurals, which are the majority, are lesson 10. Agreement with non-human plurals is lesson 11. Two of something is neither singular nor plural in Arabic - the dual is lesson 12. And a family of nouns that refuses tanwīn altogether, among them names such as فاطِمَةُ and broken plurals such as مَدارِسُ, is lesson 41.

Forms & patterns

جَمْعُ المُذَكَّرِ السّالِم, with the singular alongside so you can see what the ending replaces:

جَمْعُ المُؤَنَّثِ السّالِم - note that the bottom two rows are identical:

Words that take the sound masculine plural:

Words that take the sound feminine plural - people first, then things:

Agreement, singular against plural:

The ن in and out of an إِضافَة (recognition only - lesson 20 owns the rule):

Examples

Common mistakes

• رَأَيْتُ الطّالِباتَ -> رَأَيْتُ الطّالِباتِ - the sound feminine plural never takes a fatḥa. Its accusative is spelled and pronounced exactly like its genitive.
• رَأَيْتُ طالِباتاً -> رَأَيْتُ طالِباتٍ - and the indefinite accusative is kasratān, so there is no silent alif to add either. The ـات ending simply has no fatḥa form.
• رَأَيْتُ الْمُعَلِّمونَ -> رَأَيْتُ الْمُعَلِّمينَ - ـونَ is only for the subject. The object, and anything after a preposition, takes ـينَ.
• مَعَ الْمُهَنْدِسونَ -> مَعَ الْمُهَنْدِسينَ - same rule seen from the other side: a preposition puts its noun in the مَجْرور, and for this plural that is ـينَ.
• مُعَلِّمينٌ -> مُعَلِّمينَ - the sound masculine plural takes no tanwīn in any case. Only الـ marks it definite; without الـ it is already indefinite.
• مُعَلِّمونُ -> مُعَلِّمونَ - the ن of this plural always carries a fatḥa, whichever case the word is in.
• مُعَلِّمَةونَ -> مُعَلِّماتٌ - a feminine noun can never take ـونَ. Drop the ة and add ـات; that is the only regular plural it has.
• كِتابونَ / سَيّارونَ -> كُتُبٌ / سَيّاراتٌ - ـونَ is for male humans only. A book takes a broken plural (lesson 10), a car takes ـات.
• رَجُلونَ -> رِجالٌ - a male human, yes, but this particular noun has a broken plural. Eligibility is not obligation; learn each noun’s plural with the noun.
• المُعَلِّمونَ الْجَديدُ -> المُعَلِّمونَ الْجُدُدُ - an adjective describing a human plural must itself be plural, even when its plural is of the other kind.
• المُعَلِّماتُ الْجَديدَةُ -> المُعَلِّماتُ الْجَديداتُ - feminine singular agreement is for non-human plurals (lesson 11). Women are human, so the adjective is plural.
• المُعَلِّمونَ الْمَدْرَسَةِ -> مُعَلِّمو الْمَدْرَسَةِ - in an إِضافَة the ن drops and the first term loses its article.

Tips

• Learn the masculine plural as a pair of sounds, not as a table: ـونَ for the doer, ـينَ for everyone else. Say a dozen nouns aloud both ways until the swap is automatic.
• Store every new noun with its plural, the way you already store it with its tanwīn: مُهَنْدِسٌ - مُهَنْدِسونَ، سَيّارَةٌ - سَيّاراتٌ. Guessing costs more than memorising.
• The single fact worth over-learning from this lesson is that ـات has no fatḥa. Write out رَأَيْتُ الطّالِباتِ a few times; the error it prevents is the one examiners look for.
• A quick eligibility test for ـونَ: could you point at the group and say “these men”? If not - if it is women, objects, animals or ideas - the ending is out of the question.
• ـات is your fallback. When you genuinely do not know a plural and the noun is feminine or inanimate, ـات is more often right than any broken pattern you might invent.
• Do not try to hear the feminine case endings in speech; they vanish before a pause. Treat them as something you produce in writing and in careful reading.
• Ignore for now what happens when these plurals meet a number, and what a group of two takes - numbers are lesson 26 and the dual is lesson 12.
• When you meet مُعَلِّمو or مُهَنْدِسي in a text and the ن seems to be missing, look at the next word: it will be the second half of an إِضافَة.

In short

The previous lesson gave you plurals you build by adding something to the end of the word: ـونَ / ـينَ for men, ـاتٌ for women and for many feminine things. Those are the tidy ones, and they are the minority. Most Arabic nouns make their plural a different way entirely: they keep their consonants and rebuild everything else. كِتابٌ becomes كُتُبٌ. بَيْتٌ becomes بُيوتٌ. مَدْرَسَةٌ becomes مَدارِسُ. Nothing was appended - the word was poured into a new mould. Arabic grammar calls this جَمْعُ التَّكْسير, “the plural of breaking”, because the singular is broken up and reassembled. English keeps three or four fossils of the same idea (foot/feet, mouse/mice); in Arabic it is the normal way to make a plural.

There is one piece of bad news and one piece of good news. The bad: you cannot work out which mould a noun uses. قَلْبٌ and كَلْبٌ have exactly the same shape, and their plurals are قُلوبٌ and كِلابٌ. The mould is part of the word, like gender, and it has to be learned with the word. The good: a small number of moulds cover most of what you will read. Nine of them are tabled below, and after a few weeks you will recognise a broken plural on sight even in a word you have never met. The lesson ends with a related trick - collective nouns like شَجَرٌ and سَمَكٌ, where the plain word is the mass and the ending ة cuts one unit out of it.

The rule

1. Two plural systems; the broken one is the bigger. A sound plural (lesson 9) leaves the singular untouched and adds an ending: مُهَنْدِسٌ ← مُهَنْدِسونَ، مُعَلِّمَةٌ ← مُعَلِّماتٌ. A broken plural changes the vowels inside the word, and often adds a consonant at the front (أ or م) or a long vowel in the middle. Compare:

• sound: طَبيبَةٌ ← طَبيباتٌ (nothing inside the word moved)
• broken: طَبيبٌ ← أَطِبّاءُ (every vowel is different, and a new أ appeared)

Which system a noun uses is a fact about that noun. Sound masculine plurals are mostly limited to male human beings and participles; ـاتٌ is common but far from automatic. Everything else - including the great majority of everyday concrete nouns - breaks.

2. The mould belongs to the word, not to a rule. This is the point to accept early, because fighting it wastes months. Two nouns of identical shape routinely take different moulds:

• قَلْبٌ ← قُلوبٌ but كَلْبٌ ← كِلابٌ
• بَيْتٌ ← بُيوتٌ but شَيْخٌ ← شُيوخٌ and عَيْنٌ ← عُيونٌ (here they happen to agree)
• وَلَدٌ ← أَوْلادٌ but جَبَلٌ ← جِبالٌ

So treat the plural as a second half of the dictionary entry. When you write a new noun in your notebook, write two words: قَلَمٌ - أَقْلامٌ. Never one.

3. The nine moulds worth knowing first. They are set out in full in the next section. In prose, what each one is typically for:

• أَفْعال - the workhorse for short three-consonant nouns: قَلَمٌ ← أَقْلامٌ، وَلَدٌ ← أَوْلادٌ، بابٌ ← أَبْوابٌ، يَوْمٌ ← أَيّامٌ.
• فُعول - equally common, especially from nouns shaped فَعْل or فِعْل: بَيْتٌ ← بُيوتٌ، قَلْبٌ ← قُلوبٌ، دَرْسٌ ← دُروسٌ، عِلْمٌ ← عُلومٌ.
• فِعال - people and things alike: رَجُلٌ ← رِجالٌ، جَبَلٌ ← جِبالٌ، بَحْرٌ ← بِحارٌ. It also serves as the plural of the adjective فَعيل: كَبيرٌ ← كِبارٌ، صَغيرٌ ← صِغارٌ.
• فُعُل - typically from singulars with a long vowel: كِتابٌ ← كُتُبٌ، مَدينَةٌ ← مُدُنٌ، سَبيلٌ ← سُبُلٌ.
• فُعَل - the plural of the shape فُعْلَة, and here you may actually predict: غُرْفَةٌ ← غُرَفٌ، صورَةٌ ← صُوَرٌ. A handful of فَعْلَة nouns join them: دَوْلَةٌ ← دُوَلٌ.
• فُعّال - the plural of the human agent noun فاعِل: طالِبٌ ← طُلّابٌ، عامِلٌ ← عُمّالٌ، كاتِبٌ ← كُتّابٌ، ساكِنٌ ← سُكّانٌ.
• مَفاعِل - from four-letter singulars beginning with م: مَكْتَبٌ ← مَكاتِبُ، مَدْرَسَةٌ ← مَدارِسُ، مَسْجِدٌ ← مَساجِدُ.
• مَفاعيل - the same, when the singular has a long vowel before its last consonant: مِفْتاحٌ ← مَفاتيحُ، مَوْضوعٌ ← مَواضيعُ، مَشْروعٌ ← مَشاريعُ.
• أَفْعِلاء - human nouns and qualities shaped فَعيل: صَديقٌ ← أَصْدِقاءُ، طَبيبٌ ← أَطِبّاءُ، غَنِيٌّ ← أَغْنِياءُ.

4. Where prediction does work. The moulds are unpredictable for short, basic nouns. They are much more regular for longer, derived ones, and this is worth exploiting:

• A noun of four consonants or more almost always goes to مَفاعِل or مَفاعيل (or their twins فَعالِل / فَعاليل when the first letter is not م): صُنْدوقٌ ← صَناديقُ، مَلْعَبٌ ← مَلاعِبُ. The standing exception is the participles of lesson 9 - مُهَنْدِسٌ ← مُهَنْدِسونَ، مُعَلِّمَةٌ ← مُعَلِّماتٌ - which are long but take the sound plural. The rule of thumb: long singular, long plural, with ـا after the second letter.
• فاعِل naming a person usually goes to فُعّال or فَعَلَة: عامِلٌ ← عُمّالٌ، طالِبٌ ← طَلَبَةٌ. The sound plural stays available beside it (طالِبونَ، عامِلونَ).
• فَعيل naming a person or a human quality goes to أَفْعِلاء or فُعَلاء: كَريمٌ ← كُرَماءُ.
• فُعْلَة goes to فُعَل: نُقْطَةٌ ← نُقَطٌ.

Lesson 22 will show you the machinery behind all of this - the three-consonant root and the patterns poured over it. For now use these four tendencies as guesses, and check them.

5. A broken plural is an ordinary noun grammatically. This is the part beginners get wrong after learning ـونَ. A broken plural takes the ordinary singular-style endings ـٌ ـَ ـِ (with tanwīn when indefinite), takes الـ when definite, and never takes ـونَ or ـينَ on top:

• كُتُبٌ - كُتُبًا - كُتُبٍ, exactly like بَيْتٌ - بَيْتًا - بَيْتٍ

For agreement, a broken plural of male human beings behaves like a plural: الطُّلّابُ مُجْتَهِدونَ، الرِّجالُ كِرامٌ. A broken plural of things does something surprising, and lesson 11 is entirely about it - do not worry when you see a feminine singular adjective after a plural noun in the examples below.

6. Three of the nine take no tanwīn: the diptote flag. مَفاعِل، مَفاعيل and أَفْعِلاء belong to a class called المَمْنوع مِنَ الصَّرْف - “barred from full inflection”. Two things change:

• they never carry tanwīn: مَدارِسُ, not *مَدارِسٌ; مَفاتيحُ, not *مَفاتيحٌ
• in the genitive they take a fatḥa, not a kasra: دَرَسْتُ فِي مَدارِسَ كَثيرَةٍ

The second departure switches off the moment the word becomes definite with الـ or heads an إِضافَة (lesson 20): فِي المَدارِسِ، فِي مَدارِسِ المَدينَةِ - the ordinary kasra is back. The first never arises there, since a definite noun carries no tanwīn in any case. That is all you need at A1; lesson 41 gives the whole class and the rest of its members.

7. Collective nouns work the other way round. A small but very frequent group of nouns - plants, fruit, animals, small countable stuff - has its bare form standing for the kind or the mass, and adds ة to pick out one of them. The bare form is called اسْمُ الجِنْسِ الجَمْعِيّ, the ة-form اسْمُ الوَحْدَة:

• شَجَرٌ “trees, tree-stuff” - شَجَرَةٌ “a tree”
• تُفّاحٌ “apples” - تُفّاحَةٌ “an apple”
• سَمَكٌ “fish (as a kind or a dish)” - سَمَكَةٌ “a fish”
• بَقَرٌ “cattle” - بَقَرَةٌ “a cow”

Note the direction: the ة does not make it feminine-and-plural, it subtracts a unit from a mass. This is the opposite of what ة normally does, which is why it trips people up.

8. The bare collective takes singular agreement. Grammatically شَجَرٌ is a singular noun, however plural it feels in English, and masculine is the default: الشَّجَرُ جَميلٌ، السَّمَكُ لَذيذٌ، البَقَرُ كَبيرٌ. Never *الشَّجَرُ جَميلونَ. (Arabic also allows some collectives to be treated as feminine - هٰذا نَخْلٌ and هٰذِهِ نَخْلٌ are both attested - but stay with the masculine at A1.)

9. And the unit noun has its own plural. Once you have singled out one unit, you can count several of them, and then a real plural appears - broken for some words, sound ـاتٌ for others: شَجَرَةٌ ← أَشْجارٌ، سَمَكَةٌ ← أَسْماكٌ، تُفّاحَةٌ ← تُفّاحاتٌ. So each of these words has three forms, and each does a different job: the mass, one item, several items.

Forms & patterns

The nine high-yield moulds. Every plural here is given with its full ending, so you can see at a glance which ones refuse tanwīn:

The three endings, side by side, for an ordinary plural and a diptote one. Read the third row first - it is the only place the two systems really part company:

Collectives in their three forms:

Left out on purpose: the moulds فَواعِل، فُعَلاء، فَعالِلَة and a dozen rarer ones, and the distinction Arabic makes between a “plural of few” and a “plural of many”. You will meet them naturally, word by word.

Examples

Common mistakes

• كِتابونَ -> كُتُبٌ - the ending ـونَ belongs to male human beings, so a noun for a thing never takes it, whatever its plural looks like.
• الطُّلّابونَ -> الطُّلّابُ - and you certainly cannot use both systems at once. طُلّابٌ is already the plural; adding ـونَ plurals it twice.
• بَيْتاتٌ -> بُيوتٌ - ـاتٌ is not a general-purpose plural ending. Use the broken plural the word actually has; بَيْتٌ has بُيوتٌ and nothing else.
• مَدْرَساتٌ -> مَدارِسُ - the ending ة does not guarantee an ـاتٌ plural. (The word مُدَرِّساتٌ that you may have met is the plural of مُدَرِّسَةٌ “female teacher” - a different word.)
• أَقْلابٌ -> قُلوبٌ - you cannot copy a mould from a similar-looking word. قَلَمٌ takes أَفْعال and قَلْبٌ takes فُعول, and only the dictionary knows.
• مَدارِسٌ / مَفاتيحٌ -> مَدارِسُ / مَفاتيحُ - these moulds are مَمْنوعٌ مِنَ الصَّرْف and never take tanwīn, in any case.
• فِي مَدارِسِ كَثيرَةٍ -> فِي مَدارِسَ كَثيرَةٍ - an indefinite diptote takes fatḥa after a preposition. Note that the adjective is a normal word and keeps its kasra.
• فِي مَدارِسَ المَدينَةِ -> فِي مَدارِسِ المَدينَةِ - but as soon as the word is definite or heads an إِضافَة, the kasra comes back. The fatḥa rule is for the bare indefinite form only.
• أَكَلْتُ تُفّاحٌ كَبيرَةٌ. -> أَكَلْتُ تُفّاحَةً كَبيرَةً. - if you mean one apple you need the ة; the bare collective means apples in general.
• الشَّجَرُ جَميلونَ. -> الشَّجَرُ جَميلٌ. - a bare collective counts as singular, not plural, whatever it means.

Tips

• Learn every noun as a pair, out loud, from the first day: قَلَمٌ - أَقْلامٌ، بَيْتٌ - بُيوتٌ، مَدْرَسَةٌ - مَدارِسُ. Retro-fitting plurals onto a hundred nouns you learned bare is miserable.
• Recognise, do not derive. Your task with broken plurals at A1 is to hear مَفاتيحُ and think “plural of something”, not to produce it from مِفْتاحٌ by rule.
• Use the shape as a first guess: an أ in front plus a long ـا usually means a plural; ـا after the second consonant in a long word almost always does; a doubled middle consonant with ـُ in front (طُلّاب، عُمّال) is usually a plural of people - though not always, as تُفّاح shows.
• Length is your friend. Short words are wild; long words are tame. If the singular has four consonants, guess مَفاعِل / مَفاعيل and you will usually be right.
• Tie the diptote flag to the shape, not to a list: مَدارِسُ، مَفاتيحُ، أَصْدِقاءُ. If a plural looks like one of those three moulds, expect no tanwīn and fatḥa in the genitive.
• With collectives, ask yourself “the whole kind, or one of them?” before you write. That single question decides between سَمَكٌ and سَمَكَةٌ - and it is the same question in تُفّاح، بَقَر، بَيْض، وَرَق.
• Ignore for now how the adjective agrees with a plural of things. It is genuinely odd, and the very next lesson is about nothing else.
• Counting these plurals (three books, ten schools) has its own rules and its own lesson - 31. Until then, use them without a number in front.

In short

English has one “they”, and it covers everyone and everything: the teachers are new, the books are new, they are new. Arabic asks a question English never asks. The moment a noun is plural, Arabic wants to know whether the plural stands for people or for anything else - things, animals, ideas, places, machines. People are called العاقِل and keep ordinary plural agreement. Everything else is غَيْرُ العاقِل, and Arabic treats its plural as a feminine singular: not “the books are new” but, quite literally, “the books is new” - الكُتُبُ جَديدَةٌ.

This is not a curiosity you can meet later. It reaches the adjective (الكُتُبُ الجَديدَةُ), the verb (وَصَلَتِ الرَّسائِلُ), the pronoun (أَيْنَ الكُتُبُ؟ - هِيَ عَلى المَكْتَبِ) and the demonstrative (هٰذِهِ الكُتُبُ). It is also the single rule learners break most often, because the English “they” keeps leaking in and produces *الكُتُبُ جُدُدٌ or *الكُتُبُ هُمْ. Fix one habit - when the plural is not people, think هِيَ - and a dozen different errors disappear at once.

The rule

1. Two classes of plural: العاقِل and غَيْرُ العاقِل. Arabic grammar sorts plural nouns by what they refer to, not by how they are spelled:

• العاقِل - human beings: مُعَلِّمونَ، طُلّابٌ، رِجالٌ، نِساءٌ، أَطْفالٌ، مُهَنْدِساتٌ.
• غَيْرُ العاقِل - everything else: كُتُبٌ، أَبْوابٌ، سَيّاراتٌ، مُدُنٌ، أَشْجارٌ، أَفْكارٌ، قِطَطٌ، كِلابٌ، لُغاتٌ، أَسْئِلَةٌ.

Note where animals fall. عاقِل means “possessing reason”, so it covers people only; cats, dogs, birds and horses are غَيْرُ العاقِل and follow the rule of things.

2. The rule itself, in one line. A plural of غَيْرِ العاقِل behaves, for every kind of agreement, exactly like a feminine singular noun. Whatever you would say about مَدْرَسَةٌ, you say about كُتُبٌ.

Compare a real feminine singular with a non-human plural and you will see they move together:

• المَدْرَسَةُ الجَديدَةُ - المَدارِسُ الجَديدَةُ
• المَدْرَسَةُ كَبيرَةٌ - المَدارِسُ كَبيرَةٌ
• المَدْرَسَةُ قَريبَةٌ، وَهِيَ جَميلَةٌ - المَدارِسُ قَريبَةٌ، وَهِيَ جَميلَةٌ

3. How the plural was formed makes no difference. Lessons 9 and 14 gave you two machines for building plurals. Neither one changes this rule:

• broken plural: الكُتُبُ الجَديدَةُ، الأَبْوابُ مَفْتوحَةٌ، المُدُنُ الكَبيرَةُ جَميلَةٌ
• sound feminine plural: السَّيّاراتُ كَبيرَةٌ، اللُّغاتُ الأَجْنَبِيَّةُ مُهِمَّةٌ

The ending ـات on السَّيّارات is very tempting: it looks like a feminine plural, so learners give it a feminine plural adjective, *السَّيّاراتُ كَبيراتٌ. Wrong. The shape of the noun decides nothing here; the referent decides everything, and cars are not people.

4. The gender of the singular makes no difference either. كِتابٌ is masculine, سَيّارَةٌ is feminine - once they are plural and non-human, both take the same feminine singular agreement: الكُتُبُ جَديدَةٌ، السَّيّاراتُ جَديدَةٌ. You can forget the singular’s gender at that point.

5. The adjective. Both jobs of the adjective from lesson 8 work as they always did; the adjective simply appears in its feminine singular form:

• attributive (inside the noun phrase, copying definiteness and case): الأَسْئِلَةُ الصَّعْبَةُ
• predicate (in a nominal sentence, indefinite and مَرْفوع): الأَسْئِلَةُ صَعْبَةٌ

Case and definiteness still behave normally, so the adjective changes its ending with the noun:

• مَرْفوع: الكُتُبُ الجَديدَةُ عَلى المَكْتَبِ.
• مَنْصوب: قَرَأْتُ الكُتُبَ الجَديدَةَ.
• مَجْرور: في الكُتُبِ الجَديدَةِ صُوَرٌ كَثيرَةٌ.
• indefinite: هٰذِهِ كُتُبٌ جَديدَةٌ.

6. The verb. A non-human plural subject takes a feminine singular verb - the same form you would use for هِيَ:

• past: وَصَلَتِ الرَّسائِلُ. / الرَّسائِلُ وَصَلَتْ.
• present: تَصِلُ الطّائِراتُ في الصَّباحِ. / الطّائِراتُ تَصِلُ في الصَّباحِ.

Do not write *الرَّسائِلُ وَصَلوا or *الطّائِراتُ يَصِلونَ. Those are the human forms. The order of verb and subject in a verbal sentence, and what agreement a human subject triggers when it follows its verb, are the subject of lesson 19; all you need now is that the feminine singular verb is right for non-human plurals in either order.

7. The pronoun. Refer back to a non-human plural with هِيَ, and attach ـها to nouns and particles:

• أَيْنَ الكُتُبُ؟ - هِيَ عَلى المَكْتَبِ.
• المُدُنُ القَديمَةُ جَميلَةٌ، وَشَوارِعُها ضَيِّقَةٌ.
• الحَقائِبُ ثَقيلَةٌ، لٰكِنَّها صَغيرَةٌ.

English “they” and “them” become هِيَ and ـها here, never هُمْ and ـهُمْ.

8. The demonstrative. “These books” is هٰذِهِ الكُتُبُ, exactly as you would say هٰذِهِ المَدْرَسَةُ. هٰؤُلاءِ is for people only. Take this as recognition for now - the demonstratives get their own lesson at step 17.

9. The human column, so the contrast is visible. People keep full plural agreement, and the adjective, verb and pronoun all match their gender:

• المُعَلِّمونَ الجُدُدُ وَصَلوا. هُمْ في الغُرْفَةِ. هٰؤُلاءِ المُعَلِّمونَ.
• المُعَلِّماتُ الجَديداتُ وَصَلْنَ. هُنَّ في الغُرْفَةِ. هٰؤُلاءِ المُعَلِّماتُ.

جُدُدٌ is the plural of جَديدٌ used for people; in modern Arabic it does not describe books. جَديداتٌ is the feminine plural used for people; it does not describe cars. Keep each word in its own column.

10. Nouns that name groups of people. Some non-human nouns have people inside them: الدُّوَلُ (states), الحُكوماتُ (governments), الشَّرِكاتُ (companies), الفِرَقُ (teams), الجامِعاتُ (universities). The noun names the entity, not the persons, so it follows the non-human rule: الشَّرِكاتُ الكَبيرَةُ، الفِرَقُ الرِّياضِيَّةُ جاهِزَةٌ، الدُّوَلُ العَرَبِيَّةُ.

11. Where the rule does not reach. It is a rule about plurals only. A singular non-human noun keeps ordinary agreement by its own gender - الكِتابُ الجَديدُ، البابُ مَفْتوحٌ - and the dual has a system of its own, which is the next lesson. Nothing here applies to الكِتابانِ.

12. Recognition only: the feminine plural is also attested. In poetry, older prose and some set expressions you will meet a non-human plural with a feminine plural adjective: الجِبالُ الشّامِخاتُ، اللَّيالي الطَّويلاتُ. It is not an error, and it is worth being able to read. But in modern writing the feminine singular is overwhelmingly the norm - الجِبالُ الشّاهِقَةُ - so produce that one and only that one. Treat the plural version the way you treat an old-fashioned English spelling: recognise it, do not imitate it.

Forms & patterns

The core contrast. Read it down the two columns, not across the rows:

The singular’s own gender is irrelevant once the noun goes plural:

The adjective still carries case and definiteness in the ordinary way:

Human plurals, for comparison only - both genders keep their own plural forms:

Left out here: the dual (lesson 12), the relative pronoun that agrees the same way (lesson 39), and the agreement of a verb that stands before a human subject (lesson 19).

Examples

Common mistakes

• الكُتُبُ جُدُدٌ. -> الكُتُبُ جَديدَةٌ. - جُدُدٌ is the human plural of جَديدٌ. Books are not people, so the adjective goes into the feminine singular.
• السَّيّاراتُ كَبيراتٌ. -> السَّيّاراتُ كَبيرَةٌ. - the ـات on the noun is a trap: the ending shows how the plural was built, not who it refers to. Cars still take كَبيرَةٌ.
• أَيْنَ الكُتُبُ؟ - هُمْ عَلى المَكْتَبِ. -> هِيَ عَلى المَكْتَبِ. - the English “they” leaking in. A non-human plural is referred to with هِيَ.
• هٰؤُلاءِ الكُتُبُ. -> هٰذِهِ الكُتُبُ. - هٰؤُلاءِ points at people only; things in the plural take the feminine singular هٰذِهِ.
• الرَّسائِلُ وَصَلوا. -> الرَّسائِلُ وَصَلَتْ. - وَصَلوا is “they (men) arrived”. A plural of things takes the same verb form as هِيَ.
• الطّائِراتُ يَصِلونَ في الصَّباحِ. -> الطّائِراتُ تَصِلُ في الصَّباحِ. - the present tense follows the same rule: تـ, not يـ … ـونَ.
• الأَبْوابُ مَفْتوحونَ. -> الأَبْوابُ مَفْتوحَةٌ. - the sound masculine plural ending belongs to people; doors get the feminine singular ة.
• الكِلابُ صِغارٌ. -> الكِلابُ صَغيرَةٌ. - animals are غَيْرُ العاقِل however alive they are, so صِغارٌ (a human plural) is out of place.
• المُعَلِّمونَ الجَديدَةُ. -> المُعَلِّمونَ الجُدُدُ. - the rule runs one way only. Do not put people into the feminine singular; they keep full plural agreement.
• الكِتابُ الجَديدَةُ. -> الكِتابُ الجَديدُ. - one book is not a plural. The feminine singular agreement is triggered by the plural, never by the singular noun.

Tips

• Before choosing any adjective, verb or pronoun, silently replace the plural with هِيَ. If الكُتُبُ = هِيَ, then هِيَ جَديدَةٌ، هِيَ وَصَلَتْ، هٰذِهِ - every choice follows.
• Run the two-question check: is the noun plural? are they people? Only “yes, yes” unlocks plural agreement; “yes, no” means feminine singular, every time.
• Learn the pair of adjectives together and keep them apart: جَديدَةٌ for things, جُدُدٌ for people. The same for صَغيرَةٌ / صِغارٌ and كَبيرَةٌ / كِبارٌ.
• A useful phrase to memorise as a whole: الكُتُبُ الجَديدَةُ against الطُّلّابُ الجُدُدُ. Say them back to back until the wrong one sounds wrong.
• Do not read the noun’s ending for the answer. سَيّاراتٌ ends in ـات and مُدُنٌ does not, yet both take exactly the same feminine singular agreement.
• When you read, use the rule backwards: a lone تـ verb or a feminine singular adjective with no feminine singular noun in sight usually means a plural of things is the subject.
• Ignore for now the literary feminine plural (الجِبالُ الشّامِخاتُ). Recognise it in a text and keep producing the feminine singular yourself.
• Leave the dual out of this entirely - it has its own agreement, and it is the next lesson.

In short

English counts in twos: one, two, many. Arabic counts in threes: one, exactly two, three or more. “Exactly two” is not built with a number word - it is built into the noun itself. Add ـانِ to كِتابٌ and you get كِتابانِ, and that single word already means “two books”. There is no word for “two” in it, and none is needed. This third number is called المُثَنّى, the dual, and it is not an ornament of high style: it is compulsory. Saying كُتُبٌ when you mean two books is as wrong as saying “book” when you mean several.

The good news is that the dual is the tidiest corner of Arabic morphology. Every noun in the language forms it the same way, with no broken patterns and barely a handful of exceptions, and it has only two endings instead of three: ـانِ for the subject case, ـَيْنِ for everything else. The work is not in building the form - it is in remembering to use it, and in dragging along everything that has to agree with it: the adjective, the pronoun, the verb.

The rule

1. Two endings, not three. Singular nouns have three case endings; the dual collapses them into two. The nominative (مَرْفوع) ends in ـانِ; the accusative (مَنْصوب) and the genitive (مَجْرور) share one ending, ـَيْنِ:

• كِتابٌ -> كِتابانِ (nominative) / كِتابَيْنِ (accusative and genitive)
• طالِبٌ -> طالِبانِ / طالِبَيْنِ

So you use كِتابانِ when the word is the subject of a sentence, and كِتابَيْنِ when it is an object or follows a preposition:

• عَلَى الطّاوِلَةِ كِتابانِ. - two books are on the table (subject)
• قَرَأْتُ كِتابَيْنِ. - I read two books (object)
• فِي كِتابَيْنِ - in two books (after a preposition)

Note the vowel on the ن: it is a kasra in both forms - ـانِ، ـَيْنِ. The sound masculine plural of lesson 9 looks similar but puts a fatḥa there - ـونَ، ـينَ. Dual nūn = kasra, plural nūn = fatḥa. That one contrast keeps المُعَلِّمانِ (“the two teachers”) apart from المُعَلِّمونَ (“the teachers”).

2. Building it: take the singular, drop the tanwīn, add the ending. There is nothing else to do. The dual never takes tanwīn - not in any case, not ever - and the article changes nothing about the ending:

• بَيْتٌ -> بَيْتانِ / بَيْتَيْنِ ; البَيْتانِ / البَيْتَيْنِ
• قَلَمٌ -> قَلَمانِ / قَلَمَيْنِ ; القَلَمانِ / القَلَمَيْنِ

One spelling change, and only one: a feminine noun ending in ة opens that ة into a full ت before the ending, because it is no longer at the end of the word:

• مُعَلِّمَةٌ -> مُعَلِّمَتانِ / مُعَلِّمَتَيْنِ
• سَيّارَةٌ -> سَيّارَتانِ / سَيّارَتَيْنِ
• مَدينَةٌ -> مَدينَتانِ / مَدينَتَيْنِ

A small family of very short nouns brings back a weak letter that the singular had lost: أَبٌ -> أَبَوانِ، أَخٌ -> أَخَوانِ. Learn those two as they come; they are not a productive pattern.

3. The dual is obligatory - there is no phrase “two books”. This is the point that decides whether your Arabic sounds native. Where English needs a number, Arabic needs a form:

You never say اِثْنانِ كُتُبٍ, “two of books”, the way you might in English or French. The plural كُتُبٌ means three or more, so using it for a pair is a real mistake, not a stylistic choice. And when English says “both”, Arabic usually just says the dual: رَأَيْتُ الوَلَدَيْنِ covers both “I saw the two boys” and “I saw both boys”. (There is a dedicated word for “both”, كِلا / كِلْتا, but it belongs with the quantifiers in lesson 42.)

4. اِثْنانِ only adds emphasis. The number word اِثْنانِ / اِثْنَتانِ does exist, and it declines like any dual (اِثْنَيْنِ / اِثْنَتَيْنِ in the other cases). But it does not count the noun the way “two” does in English. It comes after the already-dual noun and simply insists on the number:

• طالِبانِ اثْنانِ فَقَطْ - only two students, no more
• سَأَلْتُ رَجُلَيْنِ اثْنَيْنِ - I asked two men (exactly two)

Drop it and you lose nothing but the emphasis. All other numbers behave completely differently and are the business of lesson 26.

5. Adjectives go dual too - and lesson 11 does not apply here. An adjective matches its noun in number, gender, case and definiteness (lesson 8), and “dual” is a number like any other:

• كِتابانِ جَديدانِ - two new books
• الطّالِبَتانِ الجَديدَتانِ - the two new students (f)
• اِشْتَرَيْتُ قَميصَيْنِ أَبْيَضَيْنِ - I bought two white shirts

The previous lesson taught you that non-human plurals take feminine singular agreement - كُتُبٌ جَديدَةٌ. That rule is about plurals only. A dual is never treated as a feminine singular, however inanimate the noun is, so كِتابانِ جَديدَةٌ is wrong and كِتابانِ جَديدانِ is right. The same goes for verbs: السَّيّارَتانِ تَقِفانِ أَمامَ البَيْتِ, not تَقِفُ.

6. Pronouns: هُما and أَنْتُما - and no feminine dual. The independent pronouns of lesson 6 have dual members, and the attached pronouns of lesson 7 have matching endings:

• هُما - they two, both genders
• أَنْتُما - you two, both genders
• ـهُما - their (of two), them two: كِتابُهُما، مَعَهُما
• ـكُما - your (of two), you two: بَيْتُكُما، لَكُما

This is where Arabic’s usual masculine/feminine split disappears. هُما serves two men, two women and one of each; أَنْتُما likewise. There is no هُنَّما and no separate feminine suffix. Nouns and adjectives still show gender in the dual (طالِبانِ vs طالِبَتانِ) - it is the pronouns that give it up. There is also no first-person dual at all: two people speaking say نَحْنُ, the ordinary plural.

The suffix ـهُما follows the same vowel-harmony rule as ـهُ: after a kasra or a يْ it becomes ـهِما - عَلَيْهِما، فيهِما، بِهِما، إِلَيْهِما، مِنْ بَيْتِهِما.

7. The verb: a frame for now. Verbs have dual forms too, and in the third person they do keep the gender distinction the pronouns gave up - not in the present-tense ending, which is ـانِ either way, but in the prefix (the second person, أَنْتُما, stays common-gender like its pronoun):

• هُما يَكْتُبانِ - they two (m) are writing
• هُما تَكْتُبانِ - they two (f) are writing
• أَنْتُما تَكْتُبانِ - you two are writing

Recognise these three; the full present-tense table is lesson 14, and the past tense (كَتَبا، كَتَبَتا، كَتَبْتُما) is lesson 18. What matters here is only that a dual subject forces a dual verb: الوَلَدانِ يَلْعَبانِ, never يَلْعَبونَ and never يَلْعَبُ.

8. The ن drops in إِضافَة. When a dual noun is the first term of a possessive construct, its ن falls off - exactly as the sound masculine plural loses its ن. What is left is كِتابا (from كِتابانِ) and كِتابَيْ (from كِتابَيْنِ):

• كِتابا الطّالِبِ - the student’s two books (nominative)
• والِدا مُحَمَّدٍ - Muhammad’s parents
• عَيْنا الطِّفْلِ - the child’s eyes
• فِي يَدَيْ مُحَمَّدٍ - in Muhammad’s hands (genitive, so ـَيْ)

When that ـَيْ runs into a following الـ, it picks up a kasra to link the two words: قَرَأْتُ كِتابَيِ الطّالِبِ. The construct itself - why the first word takes no article and the second goes genitive - is lesson 20; here just register that the missing ن is a signal, not a typo.

9. Paired body parts are naturally dual. Anything the body has two of is normally spoken of in the dual, and Arabic reaches for the dual where English reaches for a plural:

عَيْنانِ (eyes)، يَدانِ (hands)، رِجْلانِ (legs)، أُذُنانِ (ears)، قَدَمانِ (feet)، شَفَتانِ (lips)، كَتِفانِ (shoulders)

English says “he opened his eyes”, but Arabic is counting: two eyes, so the dual. The same instinct covers natural pairs outside the body - والِدانِ (parents)، جَناحانِ (wings) - while anything the language sees as one object stays singular, as with سِرْوالٌ for a pair of trousers.

10. In the dialects the dual is much narrower. Spoken Egyptian, Levantine and Gulf Arabic still put a dual ending on nouns - يَوْمينْ، كِتابينْ، إيدينْ - most readily on time words, measures and everyday countables, though a number plus a plural is often preferred instead. What the dialects have dropped is the agreement: the adjective, the verb and the pronoun go plural, not dual. Maghrebi Arabic goes further and normally says زوجْ (“pair”) plus a plural. Written and formal Arabic has followed none of this: in الفُصْحى the dual is fully alive, fully obligatory and drags all its agreement with it, so do not let a dialect habit talk you out of it.

Forms & patterns

Nouns - the whole system, masculine and feminine:

With the article, nothing about the ending changes:

Noun plus adjective, all four combinations:

The pronoun grid, with the dual column filled in:

Attached pronouns, singular next to dual:

The verb frame - recognition only, the tables are lessons 14 and 22:

The ن of the dual inside an إِضافَة:

Examples

Common mistakes

• عَلَى الطّاوِلَةِ كِتابَيْنِ. -> عَلَى الطّاوِلَةِ كِتابانِ. - a subject is مَرْفوع, so it takes ـانِ. Learners default to ـَيْنِ because that is the form they hear in اِثْنَيْنِ and in the weekday الاثْنَيْنِ.
• رَأَيْتُ كِتابانِ. -> رَأَيْتُ كِتابَيْنِ. - a direct object is مَنْصوب, and the dual spells مَنْصوب and مَجْرور the same way.
• اِثْنانِ كُتُبٍ -> كِتابانِ - Arabic has no “two + plural” phrase. The number lives inside the noun, and كُتُبٌ starts at three.
• كِتابانِ جَديدَةٌ -> كِتابانِ جَديدانِ - the feminine-singular agreement of lesson 11 is for non-human plurals only. A dual always agrees as a dual.
• مُعَلِّمَةانِ -> مُعَلِّمَتانِ - the ة is no longer final, so it opens into a written ت.
• الطّالِبَتانِ جَديدَتانِ (meaning “the two new students”) -> الطّالِبَتانِ الجَديدَتانِ - an attributive adjective copies the article too; without it the phrase is a sentence, “the two students are new”.
• هُمْ طالِبانِ. -> هُما طالِبانِ. - هُمْ is three or more. Two people are always هُما, whatever their gender.
• بَيْتُهُمْ (of two people) -> بَيْتُهُما - the same slip on the attached pronoun; and after a kasra it becomes بَيْتِهِما.
• هُما يَكْتُبونَ -> هُما يَكْتُبانِ - a dual subject takes a dual verb, never the plural.
• كِتابانِ الطّالِبِ -> كِتابا الطّالِبِ - the ن of the dual drops before the second term of an إِضافَة.

Tips

• Learn the two endings as a pair of sounds, ـانِ and ـَيْنِ, and attach them to any noun you like. Apart from the أَبَوانِ / أَخَوانِ handful there are no irregular duals to memorise - the whole system is these two syllables.
• Test yourself with the subject/object question, not with a grammar term: is this word doing something (ـانِ) or having something done to it, or sitting after a preposition (ـَيْنِ)?
• The dual is the one ending you can still see in ordinary unvocalized text, because it is written with letters: ان and ين. Reading معلمين, though, you must decide between the dual مُعَلِّمَيْنِ and the sound plural مُعَلِّمينَ - reading unvocalized text, in the pronunciation guide, is about exactly that guessing game.
• Say “kasra on the nūn” out loud a few times. Dual ـانِ / ـَيْنِ against plural ـونَ / ـينَ is the whole difference in speech.
• Get in the habit of doubling everything downstream. If the noun goes dual, the adjective, the pronoun and the verb follow automatically - that reflex is more valuable than the ending itself.
• Body-part vocabulary is free practice: عَيْنانِ، يَدانِ، رِجْلانِ، أُذُنانِ are dual by nature, so drill them and you have drilled the pattern.
• Ignore اِثْنانِ for now, and ignore كِلا / كِلْتا entirely. Two of anything is the bare dual; the extra words only add emphasis you do not yet need.
• The demonstratives (هٰذانِ، هاتانِ) and the relative pronouns (اللَّذانِ، اللَّتانِ) have dual forms with the same ـانِ / ـَيْنِ switch. You will meet them in lessons 13 and 44 - the ending will already be familiar.

In short

Arabic points with two families of words: a near one built on هٰذا “this”, and a far one built on ذٰلِكَ “that”. Each family has a masculine and a feminine form, a dual, and a plural, and you choose between them the same way you chose an adjective in lesson 8 - by looking at the thing you are pointing at. The good news is that these words barely inflect: apart from the duals, every demonstrative in the language is مَبْنِيّ, frozen in one shape whatever the sentence does to it.

The whole lesson then turns on one very small thing: whether the noun after the demonstrative wears الـ. هٰذا كِتابٌ is already a complete sentence - “this is a book”. هٰذا الكِتابُ is not a sentence at all; it is the two-word phrase “this book”, still waiting for someone to say something about it. One article is the difference between making a statement and merely naming an object, and beginners get it wrong constantly. Fix the pair now and everything else in this lesson is bookkeeping.

The rule

1. The near series. These point at what is close - in space, in time, or simply on the page in front of you: هٰذا (m.sg.)، هٰذِهِ (f.sg.)، هٰذانِ / هٰذَيْنِ (m.du.)، هاتانِ / هاتَيْنِ (f.du.)، هٰؤُلاءِ (plural, people). Inside them you can still see the joints: ها is the old particle of drawing attention, and ذا، ذِهِ، ذانِ، تانِ are the pointing words proper. That is why the feminine dual is هاتانِ and not *هٰذَتانِ - it is ها + تانِ.

2. The far series. These point at what is further away, or - very often in modern prose - back at something already mentioned: ذٰلِكَ (m.sg.)، تِلْكَ (f.sg.)، أُولٰئِكَ (plural, people). Here too the parts are visible: ذا + لِ + كَ. The ل is the marker of distance, and the final كَ is addressed to the person you are speaking to, roughly “that one over there, as you can see”. Modern writing keeps ذٰلِكَ fixed for every listener; only old and very formal texts vary that final letter.

3. Everything but the duals is frozen. A demonstrative is مَبْنِيّ - it does not take case endings at all. هٰذا is هٰذا as subject, after a preposition, everywhere; هٰؤُلاءِ always ends in a kasra; ذٰلِكَ always ends in a fatḥa; تِلْكَ never changes. Only the dual forms behave like real duals and show the alif / yāʾ alternation you met in lesson 12:

• هٰذانِ الوَلَدانِ صَديقانِ. - nominative, so the alif form
• أَنا مَعَ هٰذَيْنِ الوَلَدَيْنِ. - after a preposition, so the yāʾ form
• هاتانِ الغُرْفَتانِ نَظيفَتانِ. / فِي هاتَيْنِ الغُرْفَتَيْنِ

Notice that the demonstrative and the noun move together: both are nominative, or both oblique. They are one unit, so they cannot disagree.

4. هٰذا كِتابٌ - the sentence. Put a demonstrative in front of an indefinite noun and you have a complete nominal sentence of the kind you built in lesson 2. The demonstrative is the مُبْتَدَأ, the indefinite noun is the خَبَر, and English has to supply a verb that Arabic does not need:

• هٰذا بَيْتٌ. - This is a house.
• هٰذِهِ سَيّارَةٌ سَريعَةٌ. - This is a fast car.
• ذٰلِكَ مُهَنْدِسٌ. - That is an engineer.
• هٰؤُلاءِ طُلّابٌ. - These are students.

The tanwīn on the second word is doing real work: it marks that noun as indefinite, and an indefinite noun after the pointer can only be the predicate - the sentence is finished.

5. هٰذا الكِتابُ - the phrase. Put the same demonstrative in front of a noun that carries الـ and nothing has been stated yet. The two words simply stand side by side as one naming expression, “this book”, and the sentence is still to come:

• هٰذا البَيْتُ - this house
• هٰذِهِ السَّيّارَةُ - this car
• تِلْكَ المَدينَةُ - that city
• هٰؤُلاءِ الطُّلّابُ - these students

The reason is worth keeping, because it explains every case in this lesson: a demonstrative is definite by nature. Definite pointer + definite noun = one referring phrase. Definite pointer + indefinite noun = subject + predicate = a sentence. Definiteness decides, not intonation.

6. Both constructions at once. Once you have the phrase, you can say something about it - and what you add is, of course, indefinite:

• هٰذا البَيْتُ كَبيرٌ. - This house is big.
• هٰذِهِ السَّيّارَةُ قَديمَةٌ. - This car is old.
• هٰؤُلاءِ الطُّلّابُ مِنْ مِصْرَ. - These students are from Egypt.

And if you want an adjective inside the phrase rather than a predicate after it, the adjective agrees in definiteness and takes الـ as well (lesson 8): هٰذا البَيْتُ الكَبيرُ “this big house”, which can then get its own predicate - هٰذا البَيْتُ الكَبيرُ قَديمٌ “this big house is old”. Three words, one article missing or present, three different meanings; read the pair aloud until the difference is audible.

7. Non-human plurals point with هٰذِهِ. This is lesson 11 turning up again, and it is the second big trap. Anything that is not a person - books, cars, houses, ideas - is treated in the plural as a feminine singular, so it takes the feminine singular demonstrative:

• هٰذِهِ الكُتُبُ جَديدَةٌ. - These books are new.
• تِلْكَ السَّيّاراتُ غالِيَةٌ. - Those cars are expensive.
• هٰذِهِ مُدُنٌ كَبيرَةٌ. - These are big cities.

هٰؤُلاءِ and أُولٰئِكَ are for people only: هٰؤُلاءِ الأَوْلادُ، أُولٰئِكَ المُعَلِّماتُ، هٰؤُلاءِ المُهَنْدِسونَ. Writing *هٰؤُلاءِ الكُتُبُ is the kind of mistake a native speaker notices instantly, and it is entirely avoidable: ask yourself “are these human?” before you reach for the plural demonstrative.

8. An already-definite noun still gives you a sentence. A noun made definite by an attached pronoun (lesson 7) cannot take الـ - one definiteness marker per word. So when such a noun follows a demonstrative, the phrase reading is simply not available, and what you get is the sentence:

• هٰذا كِتابي. - This is my book. (never “this book of mine”)
• هٰذِهِ مَدْرَسَتُنا. - This is our school.
• هٰذا أَحْمَدُ. - This is Ahmad.

To say “this book of mine”, you flip the order and put the demonstrative after the noun: كِتابي هٰذا جَديدٌ “this book of mine is new”، سَيّارَتُها تِلْكَ “that car of hers”. The same flip is what you will use with the إِضافَة in lesson 20. With an الـ noun, though, keep the normal order - هٰذا البَيْتُ, not البَيْتُ هٰذا.

9. The noun carries the visible grammar. Because the demonstrative is frozen, the case of the phrase shows up on the noun alone:

• هٰذا الكِتابُ جَديدٌ. - nominative on الكِتابُ
• المِفْتاحُ فِي هٰذِهِ الحَقيبَةِ. - genitive after the preposition, on الحَقيبَةِ
• مَعَ هٰؤُلاءِ الطُّلّابِ - genitive again, while هٰؤُلاءِ keeps its own kasra

The duals are the exception, as in point 3: there both words move. Everything else you write once and forget.

10. The dagger alif. هٰذا، هٰذِهِ، هٰؤُلاءِ، ذٰلِكَ، أُولٰئِكَ all contain a long ā that is pronounced but not written as an alif. In fully vocalized text it appears as a small vertical stroke, the أَلِف خَنْجَرِيَّة (dagger alif), and this path prints it. In ordinary Arabic you will see هذا، هذه، هؤلاء، ذلك، أولئك with no mark at all - the vowel is still there in the pronunciation. Never “help” the spelling by writing a full alif: *هاذا and *ذالك are wrong. Two more oddities in the same family: أُولٰئِكَ contains a silent و that is written and never pronounced, and هٰذِهِ ends in a real ه, not a ة.

11. Left to other lessons. “This is the book which I read” needs الَّذي - lesson 39. “There is a book here / over there” with هُنا and هُناكَ belongs to lesson 17. Both are neighbours of this topic, and neither is needed to point at something.

Forms & patterns

The near series, in full. The right-hand column shows the shape you will actually write.

The far series, exactly parallel:

The four far duals are printed for completeness only. They are genuinely rare in modern writing - recognize them if you meet them and do not spend memory on producing them. The three you must own are ذٰلِكَ، تِلْكَ، أُولٰئِكَ.

The two constructions, side by side. This is the table to memorize:

Frozen singular against declining dual - watch which words change:

The accusative of the dual uses the same هٰذَيْنِ / هاتَيْنِ forms as the genitive; you will start writing it in lesson 29, once verbs have objects.

Spelling: what this path prints, and what you will see everywhere else.

Examples

Common mistakes

• هٰذا كِتابٌ (meaning “this book”) -> هٰذا الكِتابُ - with an indefinite noun you have written the whole sentence “this is a book”. The phrase needs الـ on the noun.
• هٰذا الكِتابُ (meaning “this is a book”) -> هٰذا كِتابٌ - the reverse error. With الـ nothing has been said yet; you have only named the object.
• هٰذا البَيْتُ الكَبيرُ (meaning “this house is big”) -> هٰذا البَيْتُ كَبيرٌ - a predicate is indefinite. Put الـ on the adjective and it joins the phrase instead.
• هٰؤُلاءِ الكُتُبُ -> هٰذِهِ الكُتُبُ - هٰؤُلاءِ is for people. Non-human plurals take the feminine singular, exactly as in lesson 11.
• أُولٰئِكَ المُدُنُ -> تِلْكَ المُدُنُ - same rule in the far series: cities are not people.
• هٰذِهِ الكِتابُ -> هٰذا الكِتابُ - كِتاب is masculine, so the pointer is masculine. Check the noun’s gender before you point.
• هٰذا كِتابي (meaning “this book of mine”) -> كِتابي هٰذا - a noun carrying a pronoun suffix cannot take الـ, so the demonstrative has to follow it to make a phrase.
• فِي هٰذانِ الكِتابَيْنِ -> فِي هٰذَيْنِ الكِتابَيْنِ - the dual demonstrative is the one form that declines, and after a preposition it must match its noun.
• هٰذَيْنِ الطّالِبانِ نَشيطانِ -> هٰذانِ الطّالِبانِ نَشيطانِ - subject position, so both words take the alif form.
• هاذا / ذالك -> هٰذا / ذٰلِكَ (written هذا / ذلك) - the long ā of these words is never written as a full alif.
• أُلٰئِكَ -> أُولٰئِكَ - the silent و is part of the spelling even though you do not pronounce it.

Tips

• One question decides everything: does the noun after the demonstrative wear الـ? With الـ it is a phrase; without it, you have made a statement. Say هٰذا بَيْتٌ / هٰذا البَيْتُ out loud as a pair until the choice is reflex.
• Learn هٰذا and هٰذِهِ first and thoroughly. هٰذِهِ alone covers feminine singulars and every non-human plural in the language, which makes it the most useful of them all.
• Remember that ال after a demonstrative is هَمْزَةُ الوَصْل: هٰذا الكِتابُ runs together as one unbroken group, with no glottal stop and no extra vowel between the two words.
• Keep writing the shadda on sun letters inside the phrase: هٰذا الطّالِبُ، هٰذِهِ السَّيّارَةُ، ذٰلِكَ الرَّجُلُ.
• Hook the far series on its own shape: ذا + لِ + كَ. The ل of distance shows up only in ذٰلِكَ and تِلْكَ, but every far form ends in that كَ.
• Do not practise producing the far duals ذانِكَ، تانِكَ. Recognizing them is enough; even careful modern writers reach for something else.
• Print the dagger alif while you are learning, then drop it when you write real Arabic - but never drop the sound. هذا is two syllables with a long first one.
• Pointing at a person you can see, and pointing back at something said three lines earlier, use the same words. In news and academic prose ذٰلِكَ is usually the second kind, and it is one of the commonest words on the page.

In short

Every sentence you have built so far has been a nominal sentence - a subject and a predicate with no verb at all: البَيْتُ كَبيرٌ، هٰذِهِ سَيّارَتي. This lesson gives you the verb. Arabic runs on two tenses only, and the one called المُضارِع is the one that does the present: أَكْتُبُ “I write”, نَدْرُسُ “we study”, يَشْرَبونَ “they drink”. Learn its thirteen forms and you can say what anybody is doing.

The machinery is unusually tidy. A letter in front of the verb tells you the person - أ for “I”, نـ for “we”, تـ for “you”, يـ for “he” - and an ending at the back tells you the number and the gender. English needs a separate pronoun and an auxiliary to say “she is writing”; Arabic says تَكْتُبُ and is finished. The one thing you cannot work out for yourself is the vowel in the middle of the stem, and for that there is a dictionary.

The rule

1. One Arabic tense, two English ones. المُضارِع covers both the habit and the thing happening right now. أَدْرُسُ العَرَبِيَّةَ is “I study Arabic” (every week, as a fact about me) and “I am studying Arabic” (at this moment, with the book open). Arabic has no separate progressive conjugation and needs none - a word like الآنَ “now” or كُلَّ يَوْمٍ “every day” supplies the difference when it matters. Do not go looking for an equivalent of “am/is/are + -ing”; there isn’t one, and that is one whole English tense you never have to translate.

2. The prefix carries the person. Four letters, glued to the front of the stem, and in Form I each carries a fatḥa:

• أَـ = I - أَكْتُبُ
• نَـ = we - نَكْتُبُ
• تَـ = you (any number, any gender), plus “she” and “they two” (f.) - تَكْتُبُ
• يَـ = he, plus “they” (m.) and “they” (f.pl.) - يَكْتُبُ

This is the opposite of the past tense you meet in lesson 18, where everything happens at the back of the word. Here you read the front of the verb first.

3. The suffix carries number and gender. Five of the thirteen cells take no suffix at all and simply end in a ḍamma - four shapes, because تَكْتُبُ serves two of them: أَكْتُبُ، نَكْتُبُ، تَكْتُبُ، يَكْتُبُ. The rest add one of four endings:

• ـينَ - you, one woman: تَكْتُبينَ
• ـانِ - any two people: تَكْتُبانِ، يَكْتُبانِ
• ـونَ - a group of men (or a mixed group): تَكْتُبونَ، يَكْتُبونَ
• ـْنَ - a group of women: تَكْتُبْنَ، يَكْتُبْنَ

Prefix plus suffix together identify the cell. تَـ alone is ambiguous; تَـ + ـينَ is not.

4. تـ does the heaviest work, and it is genuinely ambiguous. تَكْتُبُ, with nothing on the end, is both “you write” (to one man) and “she writes”. Nothing in the form distinguishes them - the sentence does. If the subject is expressed, you can see it: سَلْمى تَكْتُبُ is unmistakably “Salma writes”. If it is not, the person you are speaking to is normally “you” and anybody else is “she”. Arabic tolerates this because in a real conversation the two never collide. Get used to asking, every time you meet a تَـ verb, “you - or she?”

5. The stem vowel is dictionary information. Between the second and third root letters of a Form I verb sits a single short vowel, and for the commonest past shape, فَعَلَ, it is not predictable. كَتَبَ and ذَهَبَ look identical in the past; their imperfects are يَكْتُبُ and يَذْهَبُ. This is why an Arabic dictionary always tells you the imperfect vowel - printing the verb twice, or the bare vowel in brackets - and why you must learn a verb as a pair - كَتَبَ - يَكْتُبُ - and never as a single word. Only three vowels are possible (ـُ، ـَ، ـِ), and two hints narrow the guess: a verb with a kasra in the past (فَهِمَ، شَرِبَ) almost always takes a fatḥa in the present (يَفْهَمُ، يَشْرَبُ), and a throat letter as second or third radical often pulls a fatḥa too (ذَهَبَ - يَذْهَبُ). Everything else you simply look up. The eight verbs tabled below carry you through A1.

Note also that the first radical of the stem carries a sukūn throughout: يَكْـتُبُ، يَشْـرَبُ، يَجْـلِسُ. The stem never changes shape across the thirteen cells - only the vowel that sits in it, once, forever.

6. The final ـُ and the ن are a mood, not decoration. The plain form printed here is called المُضارِعُ المَرْفوعُ, the indicative, and it is marked in two ways: by the ḍamma on the last letter (أَكْتُبُ), or, in the forms that take an ending, by the ن of ـينَ / ـانِ / ـونَ. Both markers are removable. After certain particles the ḍamma turns into a fatḥa and those three ن’s fall off altogether - يَكْتُبَ، تَكْتُبي، يَكْتُبوا; that is the subjunctive of lesson 33. Another set of particles drops the ḍamma to a sukūn instead - يَكْتُبْ - and that is the jussive of lesson 35. You do not need either yet; you need to know that the ن you are learning is information and not padding, so that dropping it later feels like a rule and not like a typo.

Two cells are exempt: تَكْتُبْنَ and يَكْتُبْنَ. Their ـنَ is the feminine-plural pronoun itself, not a mood marker, so these two forms are the same in every mood and never change.

7. The pronoun is optional - and never carries the person. Because the prefix already says who, أَكْتُبُ on its own is a complete sentence, “I write”. Adding أَنا is possible, but it is emphasis or contrast, not grammar: أَنا أَكْتُبُ وهُوَ يَقْرَأُ “I write and he reads”. What you may never do is put a pronoun in front of a verb that disagrees with it. أَنا يَكْتُبُ is not a sentence; يـ marks a third person and can never mean “I”.

When the subject is a noun placed before the verb, as in الطُّلّابُ يَدْرُسونَ, the verb agrees with it fully, exactly as above. Arabic also likes to put the verb first, and that order changes the agreement rules - that is lesson 19, and until then keep your subject in front.

8. Three ready-made frames. Three of the most useful things a beginner says - want, must, can

• are built the same way in Arabic: a first verb, then the particle أَنْ, then a second verb whose ḍamma has become a fatḥa. Learn these as fixed blocks now and take the grammar later (lessons 33 and 39):

• أُريدُ أَنْ أَذْهَبَ - “I want to go”

• يَجِبُ أَنْ نَدْرُسَ - “we must study”

• يُمْكِنُني أَنْ أَكْتُبَ - “I can write”

Three practical points. First, the two verbs carry the same person: أُريدُ أَنْ أَذْهَبَ, but تُريدُ أَنْ تَذْهَبَ, نُريدُ أَنْ نَذْهَبَ. Second, يَجِبُ is impersonal - it does not change for person; you move the person onto the second verb: يَجِبُ أَنْ تَدْرُسَ، يَجِبُ أَنْ يَدْرُسوا. Third, يُمْكِنُ needs an attached pronoun (lesson 7) to say whose ability it is: يُمْكِنُني، يُمْكِنُكَ، يُمْكِنُها.

You may notice that أُريدُ and يُمْكِنُ take a ḍamma on the prefix, not the fatḥa of rule 2. That is because they are not Form I verbs. The system behind that is lesson 46; for now the frames are vocabulary.

9. What is deliberately not here. Verbs whose root contains و or ي (قالَ، مَشى، وَصَلَ) reshape their stem and are lessons 49-56. Verbs of the derived forms (دَرَّسَ، اسْتَقْبَلَ) build different stems and are 51-53. Both keep exactly the prefixes and suffixes of this lesson, which is why learning them here pays for itself many times over. Negating a present verb with لا is lesson 23; turning it into a future with سَـ / سَوْفَ is lesson 24; giving an order is lesson 36.

Forms & patterns

The full thirteen cells of the indicative, on the sound Form I verb كَتَبَ - يَكْتُبُ.

The same thirteen taken apart, so you can see that only the frame changes:

Eight Form I verbs to carry you through A1. The middle column is the one to memorize; the third column is the vowel you cannot guess.

Three of them in the nine cells you will use most. أَكَلَ is included because its first radical is a hamza: everything is regular except the first person, where أَ + أْ collapses into a madda - آكُلُ, not أَأْكُلُ.

The dual rows are left out of this last table only to keep it readable; they behave exactly as in the كَتَبَ paradigm above (تَذْهَبانِ، يَذْهَبانِ، تَجْلِسانِ، يَأْكُلانِ).

The three frames. أُريدُ is printed across its persons because you will need all of them; its own stem is irregular in ways that wait for lesson 50, so take the shapes as they are.

Examples

Common mistakes

• أَنا يَكْتُبُ -> أَنا أَكْتُبُ - the prefix, not the pronoun, carries the person, and يـ marks a third person, never “I”. The pronoun must match the verb or be left out.
• أَنْتِ تَكْتُبُ -> أَنْتِ تَكْتُبينَ - the feminine singular “you” must have ـينَ. Without it the form has silently become “you (m.)” or “she”.
• هِيَ يَدْرُسُ -> هِيَ تَدْرُسُ - “she” takes the تـ prefix, not يـ. The يـ of “he” is one of the commonest beginner slips because English “he/she” sit side by side.
• أَنا أَذْهُبُ -> أَنا أَذْهَبُ - the stem vowel of ذَهَبَ is a fatḥa. It cannot be derived from the past tense; it is learned with the verb.
• يَجْلُسُ -> يَجْلِسُ - and جَلَسَ takes a kasra. Same past-tense shape as كَتَبَ and ذَهَبَ, three different stem vowels.
• أَأْكُلُ -> آكُلُ - the prefix hamza and the root hamza merge into a madda in the first person of أَكَلَ. Every other cell is regular: تَأْكُلُ، يَأْكُلونَ.
• يَكْتُبوا (as a plain statement) -> يَكْتُبونَ - the ن is the mark of the indicative. The ن-less form is real Arabic, but it belongs to lessons 33 and 40.
• نَحْنُ يَدْرُسونَ -> نَحْنُ نَدْرُسُ - “we” is نـ with no ending at all. Do not let the plural meaning pull a plural suffix onto the verb.
• الطّالِباتُ يَكْتُبونَ -> الطّالِباتُ يَكْتُبْنَ - a group of women has its own ending ـْنَ. ـونَ is for men and for mixed groups.
• أُريدُ أَنْ أَذْهَبُ -> أُريدُ أَنْ أَذْهَبَ - inside the frame the second verb ends in a fatḥa, never a ḍamma. Memorize the block whole and the ending comes with it.
• أُريدُ أَنْ يَذْهَبَ (meaning “I want to go”) -> أُريدُ أَنْ أَذْهَبَ - both verbs carry the same person. As written, your sentence means “I want him to go”.
• يُمْكِنُ أَنْ أَكْتُبَ (meaning “I can write”) -> يُمْكِنُني أَنْ أَكْتُبَ - يُمْكِنُ needs an attached pronoun to say whose ability is in question.

Tips

• Learn every verb as a pair, past and present, out loud: كَتَبَ - يَكْتُبُ، ذَهَبَ - يَذْهَبُ. A single word is half a verb, and it is the half that cannot be guessed.
• Drill the eight verbs in three blocks by their vowel - u, a, i - rather than alphabetically. The vowel sticks to a group far better than to a list.
• Chant one verb straight down the five singular cells until it is reflex: أَكْتُبُ، تَكْتُبُ، تَكْتُبينَ، يَكْتُبُ، تَكْتُبُ. Add نَكْتُبُ and the four plurals next; leave the duals last.
• Read the front of a verb before the back. The prefix answers “who?” in one letter: أَـ and نَـ settle the cell outright, يَـ narrows thirteen possibilities to four and تَـ to seven.
• When you see تَـ, ask “you or she?” and let the subject or the conversation decide. This ambiguity is permanent - it is not something you will later learn to resolve inside the word.
• Keep writing the final ḍamma even though a speaker stopping at the end of a sentence will not pronounce it, because of the pausal form. It is the mood, and in a few lessons you will be changing it on purpose.
• Do not try to build “I am writing” out of separate pieces. One Arabic form covers both English presents, so the mental work here is subtraction, not addition.
• Take أُريدُ أَنْ، يَجِبُ أَنْ and يُمْكِنُني أَنْ as three unanalysed blocks, and slot any verb you know behind them with a fatḥa on the end. That single trick buys you most of what an A1 speaker needs to say.

In short

Arabic asks questions the easy way. You take a finished statement, put one small word in front of it, and you are done - nothing is inverted, no auxiliary appears, no word order changes. أَنْتَ طالِبٌ “you are a student” becomes هَلْ أَنْتَ طالِبٌ؟ “are you a student?” by adding three letters, and تَتَكَلَّمُ الْعَرَبِيَّةَ becomes هَلْ تَتَكَلَّمُ الْعَرَبِيَّةَ؟ the same way. English has to reach for do, does, did and then shuffle the subject; Arabic has nothing that corresponds to any of that.

The rest of the lesson is a vocabulary list with two pieces of grammar attached. The list is the question words - مَنْ، ما، ماذا، مَتى، أَيْنَ، كَيْفَ، لِماذا، كَمْ، أَيّ - and it is short enough to learn in an afternoon. The grammar is what trips everyone up: ما and ماذا are not interchangeable, and كَمْ and أَيّ each force a particular ending on the word after them. Get those three facts right and your questions will read as Arabic, not as translated English.

The rule

1. Two particles for yes-or-no questions. A yes-or-no question is a plain statement with a question particle glued to the front. The statement itself is untouched - same words, same order, same endings.

• هَلْ is the everyday particle. It is a separate word, written with a space after it, and it works in front of both sentence types you know: the verbal one (هَلْ تَتَكَلَّمُ الْعَرَبِيَّةَ؟) and the nominal one (هَلْ أَنْتَ طالِبٌ؟، هَلِ الْبَيْتُ كَبيرٌ؟). If you learn one thing from this lesson, learn هَلْ.
• أَ is a prefix - a single hamza written onto the first word of the sentence, with no space: أَتَعْرِفُ الْجَوابَ؟ “do you know the answer?” It is shorter, a little more formal, and it is what you will meet in headlines and in writing that wants to sound crisp.

Notice the small sound rule in هَلِ الْبَيْتُ كَبيرٌ؟: هَلْ ends in a sukūn and the hamza of الـ is not pronounced, so a helping kasra on the لام of هَلْ keeps the two consonants apart.

2. Where هَلْ cannot go, أَ can. The two particles are not fully interchangeable. هَلْ refuses to sit in front of a negated sentence, in front of إِنَّ, or in front of a conditional; أَ has no such restriction, and that is exactly why it survives in modern writing:

• لَسْتَ طالِباً “you are not a student” → أَلَسْتَ طالِباً؟ “aren’t you a student?”
• لَيْسَ هٰذا صَحيحاً “this is not correct” → أَلَيْسَ هٰذا صَحيحاً؟ “isn’t this correct?”
• The tag everyone uses: أَلَيْسَ كَذٰلِكَ؟ “isn’t that so?”

هَلْ لَسْتَ طالِباً؟ is not Arabic. The same block applies to إِنَّ-sentences, which you meet in lesson 44 - هَلْ إِنَّ… is impossible, and there too the particle is أَ. لَيْسَ itself is lesson 23; all you need here is that its predicate takes the accusative, which is why the example reads طالِباً and not طالِبٌ. One further note on أَ: on a word that itself starts with a hamza it gives you two in a row - أَأَنْتَ مِنْ مِصْرَ؟ - which is correct but awkward, and most writers prefer هَلْ أَنْتَ مِنْ مِصْرَ؟ there.

3. Three answers, not two. Arabic has an extra answer word that English lacks, and it exists precisely for negative questions:

• نَعَمْ - yes, confirming what was asked.
• لا - no.
• بَلى - “yes I am / yes it is”, contradicting a negative question.

The third one matters. Asked أَلَسْتَ طالِباً؟ “aren’t you a student?”, answering نَعَمْ agrees with the negative - it means “right, I am not”. To say “yes, I am” you must say بَلى، أَنا طالِبٌ. Note the spelling: بَلى ends in alif maqṣūra, never *بلا.

4. Information questions: the question word goes first, and nothing else moves. For a question with a question word, put the word - together with whatever it governs, see points 6 and 8 - at the front of the sentence, and leave the rest exactly as a statement would have it:

• تَسْكُنُ فِي الْقاهِرَةِ → أَيْنَ تَسْكُنُ؟
• يَبْدَأُ الدَّرْسُ فِي السّاعَةِ التّاسِعَةِ → مَتى يَبْدَأُ الدَّرْسُ؟

There is no inversion (تَسْكُنُ أَنْتَ أَيْنَ؟ is nothing), and there is no do-support. The verb keeps the person ending it already had, and a nominal sentence keeps its subject and predicate in place: مَنْ هٰذا الرَّجُلُ؟ كَيْفَ حالُكَ؟

Most of these words never change their ending, whatever their job in the sentence: مَنْ، ما، ماذا، مَتى، أَيْنَ، كَيْفَ، كَمْ are all fixed forms. The one exception is أَيّ, which declines like an ordinary noun - see point 8.

5. ما before a noun, ماذا before a verb. This is the central trap of the lesson, and it is where nearly every beginner’s first mistake lives. Both words mean “what”. They are not interchangeable:

• ما introduces a nominal sentence - it is followed by a noun, a pronoun or a demonstrative: ما اسْمُكَ؟ “what is your name?” ما هٰذا؟ “what is this?” ما رَأْيُكَ؟ “what is your opinion?” ما هُوَ الْفَرْقُ؟ “what is the difference?”
• ماذا introduces a verb: ماذا تُريدُ؟ “what do you want?” ماذا تَفْعَلُ؟ “what are you doing?” ماذا يَحْدُثُ؟ “what is happening?”

So ماذا اسْمُكَ؟ is wrong, and it is the commonest error English speakers make here, because English uses one word for both. The mechanical test: look at what comes next. Noun or pronoun → ما. Verb → ماذا. ما in front of a verb is not gibberish, but a modern reader will not take it as a question: ما تُريدُ reads either as a negation, “you do not want”, or as a relative phrase waiting for its sentence, “what you want” (lessons 39 and 73).

مَنْ has no such split. “Who” is مَنْ in front of anything: مَنْ أَنْتَ؟ (pronoun), مَنْ هٰذِهِ الْمَرْأَةُ؟ (noun phrase), مَنْ يَعْرِفُ الْجَوابَ؟ (verb).

6. A preposition travels with its question word. Arabic never leaves a preposition stranded at the end the way English does. The preposition and the question word move to the front together, as a unit:

• مِنْ أَيْنَ أَنْتَ؟ “where are you from?” - not أَيْنَ أَنْتَ مِنْ؟
• إِلى أَيْنَ تَذْهَبُ؟ “where are you going (to)?”
• مَعَ مَنْ تَسْكُنُ؟ “who do you live with?”
• لِمَنْ هٰذِهِ الْحَقيبَةُ؟ “whose bag is this?”
• فِي أَيِّ يَوْمٍ نَبْدَأُ؟ “on what day do we start?”

With ما there is a spelling twist: after a preposition, interrogative ما loses its alif and fuses with the preposition - عَنْ + ما = عَمَّ، فِي + ما = فيمَ، بِ + ما = بِمَ، لِ + ما = لِمَ. Hence عَمَّ تَبْحَثُ؟ “what are you looking for?” Those are the formal forms; modern writing very often keeps ماذا whole instead - بِماذا تَشْعُرُ؟، عَنْ ماذا تَبْحَثُ؟ - and that is perfectly acceptable. The one everybody uses without thinking is already fused: لِماذا is لِ + ماذا, “for what” → “why”, and its answer normally starts with لِأَنَّ (lesson 44).

7. كَمْ takes one singular indefinite accusative. “How many books do you have?” is كَمْ كِتاباً عِنْدَكَ؟ - singular كِتاب, indefinite, with an accusative tanwīn. Not a plural. Not كَمْ كُتُبٍ, not كَمْ كِتابٌ:

• كَمْ ساعَةً تَعْمَلُ؟ - how many hours do you work?
• كَمْ طالِباً فِي الصَّفِّ؟ - how many students are in the class?
• كَمْ مَرَّةً فِي الأُسْبوعِ؟ - how many times a week?
• كَمْ لُغَةً تَعْرِفُ؟ - how many languages do you know?

That noun has a name - تَمْييز, the accusative of specification - and the numbers 11-99 take the same thing (lesson 26; the full theory is lesson 61). For now treat it as a fixed shape: كَمْ + singular + ـاً. It sounds strange to an English ear (“how many book?”) and it is entirely regular. Three everyday questions skip the تَمْييز, because there كَمْ is itself the predicate - learn them whole: كَمْ عُمْرُكَ؟ “how old are you?”, كَمِ السّاعَةُ؟ “what time is it?”, بِكَمْ هٰذا؟ “how much is this?”

8. أَيّ heads an إِضافَة, so the noun after it is genitive. أَيّ “which” is not a particle but a noun, and it is bound to whatever follows it in a genitive construct (lesson 20). Two consequences:

• The following noun is مَجْرور and normally indefinite: أَيُّ كِتابٍ؟ “which book?” أَيُّ لَوْنٍ؟ “which colour?” Never أَيُّ الْكِتابُ. With a definite plural you get “which of the…”: أَيُّ الْكُتُبِ؟ “which of the books?”
• أَيّ itself declines according to its own job: أَيُّ / أَيَّ / أَيِّ, tabled below.

A feminine form أَيَّة exists (أَيَّةُ لُغَةٍ تَدْرُسُ؟), but the masculine أَيّ is correct with either gender, so you can recognize أَيَّة and simply use أَيّ throughout.

9. Punctuation, and the choice-question “or”. Every question ends in the Arabic question mark «؟», which faces the other way from the English one because the line runs right-to-left; never an ASCII ”?” in an Arabic sentence. In speech a statement said with rising intonation can serve as a question, as in English, but in writing use هَلْ or أَ - the particle is what warns the reader at the start that a question is coming. And in an either-or question the “or” is أَمْ, not أَوْ: أَتَشْرَبُ الشّايَ أَمِ الْقَهْوَةَ؟ “do you drink tea or coffee?” (the rest of coordination is lesson 25).

10. What this lesson leaves alone. مَنْ and ما are also relative pronouns - “the one who”, “that which” - which is lesson 39; the numbers whose تَمْييز behaves like كَمْ’s are lesson 26; and questions in the past tense wait for lesson 18.

Forms & patterns

The two yes-or-no particles:

The answers:

The question words. This is the whole working set at A1:

أَيّ takes the case its own job requires, while its noun stays genitive:

Examples

Common mistakes

• ماذا اسْمُكَ؟ -> ما اسْمُكَ؟ - a noun follows, so the word is ما. ماذا is reserved for a following verb. This is the error to fix first.
• ما تَفْعَلُ؟ (as a question) -> ماذا تَفْعَلُ؟ - in front of a verb, MSA asks with ماذا. Left as ما, the phrase reads as a negation, “you are not doing”, or as the relative “what you are doing” - either way, not a question.
• كَمْ كُتُبٍ عِنْدَكَ؟ / كَمْ كِتابٌ عِنْدَكَ؟ -> كَمْ كِتاباً عِنْدَكَ؟ - كَمْ never takes a plural, and the noun after it is accusative. The ـاً is the construction.
• أَيُّ الْكِتابُ تَقْرَأُ؟ -> أَيَّ كِتابٍ تَقْرَأُ؟ - أَيّ heads a construct, so its noun is indefinite and genitive; and أَيّ here is the object, so it is accusative itself.
• هَلْ لَسْتَ جائِعاً؟ -> أَلَسْتَ جائِعاً؟ - هَلْ cannot stand in front of a negation. The prefixed أَ is the particle that can.
• أَلَسْتَ طالِباً؟ - نَعَمْ، أَنا طالِبٌ. -> بَلى، أَنا طالِبٌ. - نَعَمْ after a negative question agrees with the negative. To contradict it you need بَلى.
• أَيْنَ أَنْتَ مِنْ؟ -> مِنْ أَيْنَ أَنْتَ؟ - Arabic does not strand prepositions at the end. The preposition moves to the front with its question word.
• تَتَكَلَّمُ أَنْتَ الْعَرَبِيَّةَ؟ -> هَلْ تَتَكَلَّمُ الْعَرَبِيَّةَ؟ - there is no inversion and no auxiliary. Add a particle at the front and change nothing else.
• كَيْفَ حالُكَ. -> كَيْفَ حالُكَ؟ - a question ends in «؟», the Arabic mark, never a full stop and never an ASCII question mark.

Tips

• Default to هَلْ. It fits in front of any plain affirmative statement of either type, which covers nearly everything you will want to ask. Add أَ to your active use for negative questions, where هَلْ is blocked.
• Memorize the pair ما اسْمُكَ؟ / ماذا تَفْعَلُ؟ as one unit. Every other case of “what” follows the pattern of one of those two, and the pair is faster to recall than the rule.
• Say كَمْ ساعَةً؟ كَمْ مَرَّةً؟ كَمْ كِتاباً؟ out loud until the -an ending arrives by itself. It is a rhythm, not a calculation.
• Watch the vowels: مَنْ “who” and مِنْ “from” are the same three letters unvocalized. Position usually settles it - مَنْ opens the question, مِنْ sits inside it.
• Collect preposition + question word as ready-made chunks: مِنْ أَيْنَ، إِلى أَيْنَ، مَعَ مَنْ، لِمَنْ، فِي أَيِّ. They behave as single words in practice.
• Ignore أَيَّة for now, and read عَمَّ، فيمَ، بِمَ without producing them - بِماذا and عَنْ ماذا serve perfectly well until they feel natural.
• Build an answer bank alongside the question words: نَعَمْ، لا، بَلى، طَبْعاً “of course”, لا أَعْرِفُ “I don’t know”. A question you cannot answer is half a conversation.

In short

Prepositions are the small words that place one thing in relation to another: in the house, from the school, to the city, with a friend. Arabic needs about a dozen of them, and they are among the first words you will recognize in any text. English prepositions are famously unpredictable; the Arabic ones are unpredictable too when it comes to meaning - but their grammar is a single mechanical rule that never has an exception.

That rule is in the name. جَرّ means “pulling”, and a حَرْفُ جَرّ pulls the noun behind it into the genitive case: the noun becomes مَجْرور and normally ends in a kasra. فِي بَيْتٍ، فِي البَيْتِ، إِلَى المَدينَةِ - every one of them ends in the same sound. So this lesson is really a short vocabulary list plus one ending, wrapped in three spelling habits: three of these words are written stuck to the next word, one of them changes shape in front of الـ, and all of them take the attached pronouns you met in lesson 7.

The rule

1. The one rule: whatever follows is مَجْرور. Put a preposition in front of a noun and the noun’s final vowel becomes a kasra (point 6 has the one class of nouns that shows the same genitive with a fatḥa instead). Nothing else about the noun changes - it keeps its article or its tanwīn, it keeps its gender and number - only the case ending moves:

• indefinite, so the kasra is doubled (tanwīn kasra, ـٍ): فِي بَيْتٍ، مِنْ مَدْرَسَةٍ، مَعَ صَديقٍ
• definite with الـ, so a single kasra (ـِ): فِي البَيْتِ، مِنَ المَدْرَسَةِ، إِلَى المَدينَةِ
• definite by a pronoun suffix, same single kasra underneath the suffix: فِي بَيْتِهِ، مَعَ صَديقِنا

An adjective describing that noun follows it into the genitive, exactly as lesson 8 said it would: فِي البَيْتِ الكَبيرِ “in the big house”, فِي بَيْتٍ كَبيرٍ “in a big house”. The adjective copies both the case and the definiteness, so the two words rhyme.

This is the first place in the path where a case ending is forced on you by another word. Learn it as a reflex: preposition first, kasra second, no thinking in between.

2. The thirteen you actually need. Arabic textbooks list around seventeen حُروف جَرّ, several of which you will meet only in poetry and oaths. The working set is in the table below. A few notes worth having before you use them:

• في is both “in” and “at” - Arabic does not split them the way English does.
• بِـ is the instrument (“with a pen”), the means (“by car”), and often just “in / at” with places and prices.
• مَعَ is company - “with a friend” - and never an instrument. English “with” covers both, so this is the pair you will mix up first.
• عِنْدَ is “at someone’s place, in someone’s possession”; it is also how Arabic says “to have” (lesson 17).
• لِـ is “for, to, belonging to”; كَـ is “like, as”.

Three rows at the bottom of the table need a footnote. بَعْدَ and قَبْلَ are not really حُروف جَرّ at all - they are ظُروف, adverbials of time and place, and so are مَعَ and عِنْدَ if you are being strict. حَتَّى does belong to the traditional list of prepositions, but most of the time you will meet it in front of a verb as “until / so that” instead (lesson 33). They are all printed here for one practical reason: whatever their label, the word after them is genitive, so the learner’s job is identical. Their own behaviour - why they themselves carry a fatḥa, بَعْدَ and قَبْلَ used without a following noun - is lesson 31.

3. Three of them are prefixes: بِـ، لِـ، كَـ. These are single letters, and a single letter cannot stand alone in Arabic writing. They are joined to the following word with no space at all, and no space is an error you can see:

• بِ + قَلَمٍ = بِقَلَمٍ “with a pen”، بِ + سَيّارَةٍ = بِسَيّارَةٍ “by car”
• لِ + مُديرٍ = لِمُديرٍ “for a director”، كَ + نَهْرٍ = كَنَهْرٍ “like a river”

In front of الـ, بِـ and كَـ simply sit down on top of it and the alif stays where it is: بِالقَلَمِ، بِالسَّيّارَةِ، كَالشَّمْسِ، كَالنَّهْرِ.

لِـ is the exception: the alif of الـ disappears. لِ + الطّالِبِ is written لِلطّالِبِ - two lāms and no alif - and لِ + المُديرِ is written لِلْمُديرِ. If the noun itself begins with ل you would in principle get three lāms; Arabic writes only two: لِ + اللُّغَةِ = لِلُّغَةِ “for the language”. No other preposition does this, and it is a spelling change only - the word is pronounced exactly as you would expect.

Two smaller habits of لِـ. In front of a noun it keeps its kasra (لِطالِبٍ، لِلْمُديرِ), but in front of a pronoun it switches to a fatḥa: لَهُ، لَها، لَكُمْ - except the first person, لي. And كَـ, alone among these, is not used with a pronoun suffix in normal Modern Standard Arabic: for “like him” you say مِثْلَهُ, not كَهُ.

4. مِنْ becomes مِنَ in front of الـ. The lām of the article carries a sukūn, and the ن of مِنْ carries a sukūn, and Arabic will not pronounce two vowelless consonants in a row. The first one therefore borrows a vowel: مِنْ + البَيْتِ = مِنَ البَيْتِ، مِنَ المَدْرَسَةِ، مِنَ الصَّباحِ.

The ordinary helping vowel is a kasra, and that is what عَنْ takes: عَنِ الكِتابِ، عَنِ الرِّحْلَةِ. مِنْ is the odd one out with its fatḥa. Both are pronunciation facts that the vocalization prints; the spelling of the letters never changes.

The same collision quietly shortens the long vowel of في، عَلى and إِلى before the article - فِي البَيْتِ is said “fi-l-bayt” - but nothing at all changes in writing, so you can simply let your mouth do it.

5. Pronouns attach, exactly as in lesson 7. A preposition plus a pronoun is one word, and the pronoun is sitting in the genitive slot even though you cannot see a kasra on it: لي، لَهُ، بِهِ، مِنّي، عَنّي، مَعَها، عِنْدَهُمْ. Three seams to remember, all of them from lesson 7:

• مِنْ and عَنْ double their ن before ـي and ـنا: مِنّي، مِنّا، عَنّي، عَنّا.
• عَلى and إِلى turn their final ى back into a ي: عَلَيْهِ، عَلَيْكَ، إِلَيْها، إِلَيْنا. In the first person the two yāʾs fuse: عَلَيَّ، إِلَيَّ. And في does the same once only: فِيَّ, against plain فيهِ، فيها.
• هُ becomes هِ after a kasra or a ي: بِهِ، فيهِ، عَلَيْهِ، إِلَيْهِمْ - but مِنْهُ، عَنْهُ، مَعَهُ، عِنْدَهُ.

6. The diptote trap: some nouns take a fatḥa here, not a kasra. A small but very common class of nouns - الاسْمُ المَمْنوعُ مِنَ الصَّرْفِ, “the noun forbidden to inflect fully” - refuses tanwīn and uses a fatḥa where everything else uses a kasra. So after a preposition you get:

• إِلى مَكَّةَ، مِنْ مِصْرَ، مَعَ أَحْمَدَ، لِفاطِمَةَ - place names and personal names
• فِي مَدارِسَ، فِي مَساجِدَ، بِمَفاتيحَ - broken plurals of the مَفاعِل / مَفاعيل shape
• فِي بَيْتٍ أَخْضَرَ - the أَفْعَل colour and elative shapes
• مَعَ أَصْدِقاءَ - and nouns ending in a long ـاء, such as the أَفْعِلاء plurals

The rescue clause: put الـ on such a noun, or make it the first word of an إِضافَة, and it behaves normally again - فِي المَدارِسِ، فِي مَدارِسِ المَدينَةِ. Which nouns belong to the class, and why, is lesson 41. For now recognize the families above and do not force a kasra onto them.

7. You cannot hear it, and usually cannot see it. Two honest warnings. When a speaker stops at the end of a phrase, the final vowel is simply not pronounced - فِي البَيْتْ - so the kasra you are learning is audible only when the sentence keeps going. And ordinary Arabic writing prints no vowel marks at all: في البيت is what you will actually read. The ending is still grammatically there, and it still decides how the sentence is parsed; it is just invisible. That is what the pronunciation guide’s lesson on reading unvocalized text is for, and it is exactly why this path vocalizes everything.

8. What this lesson deliberately does not do. Which preposition a given verb demands - why it is بَحَثَ عَنْ for “look for” and حَصَلَ عَلى for “obtain” - is a different topic and has its own lesson (35); such a preposition is part of the verb’s dictionary entry, not a matter of logic. Saying “I have” with عِنْدي or لي is lesson 17. And two nouns glued into “the door of the house”, which also produces a genitive, is the إِضافَة of lesson 20 - a different mechanism with the same visible ending.

Forms & patterns

The thirteen prepositions. The last three rows are the borderline ones described above.

The three that are written joined. Note the empty cell: كَـ does not take a pronoun.

What the genitive looks like on different kinds of noun. The first five are the ones you need today; the last three are printed so you can recognize them, and they are explained in lessons 40 and 46 - the sound feminine plural takes the ordinary kasra, but the sound masculine plural and the dual are marked by a letter, not by a vowel.

The pronoun endings, first on the four that behave plainly:

And on the ones that reshape themselves at the seam:

The feminine plurals and the duals slot in where you would expect: لَكُنَّ، لَهُنَّ، لَكُما، لَهُما، مِنْهُنَّ، عَلَيْهِما، فيهِنَّ، عِنْدَهُما. Lesson 7 has the full set.

Examples

Common mistakes

• فِي البَيْتُ -> فِي البَيْتِ - the preposition forces a kasra on the noun. A ḍamma after a preposition is always wrong, however natural the dictionary form feels.
• فِي بَيْتٌ -> فِي بَيْتٍ - an indefinite noun keeps its tanwīn, but it must be the genitive tanwīn: two kasras, not two ḍammas.
• مِنْ المَدْرَسَةِ -> مِنَ المَدْرَسَةِ - the ن of مِنْ cannot keep its sukūn in front of the vowelless lām of الـ, so it takes a fatḥa. Compare عَنِ الكِتابِ, which takes a kasra instead.
• لِ الطّالِبِ / لِالطّالِبِ -> لِلطّالِبِ - لِـ is glued on, and the alif of the article drops. Two lāms, no space, no alif.
• ب القَلَمِ -> بِالقَلَمِ - the same gluing for بِـ and كَـ, though these two keep the alif. A single letter never stands alone as a word.
• إِلى مَكَّةِ -> إِلى مَكَّةَ - مَكَّة is a diptote, so its genitive is a fatḥa. Same for مِنْ مِصْرَ، مَعَ أَحْمَدَ.
• فِي المَدارِسَ -> فِي المَدارِسِ - and the reverse error: once a diptote carries الـ, it takes the ordinary kasra again.
• مِنْي / عَنْي -> مِنّي / عَنّي - both double their ن in front of ـي and ـنا.
• عَلىهِ / إِلىها -> عَلَيْهِ / إِلَيْها - the alif maqṣūra becomes a ي as soon as anything is attached behind it.
• مَعَ أَنا / لِ هُوَ -> مَعي / لَهُ - an independent pronoun never follows a preposition. The attached set of lesson 7 is the only option.

Tips

• Over-learn one reflex: preposition, then kasra. If you can do that automatically you have ninety percent of this lesson, and it will still be true at C1.
• Store each preposition inside a whole phrase - فِي البَيْتِ، مِنَ المَدْرَسَةِ، عَلَى الطّاوِلَةِ - not as a bare word with an English gloss. The ending then comes free.
• Write بِـ، لِـ، كَـ attached from the very first day. If your hand wants to leave a space, you have filed them as words instead of as letters.
• Say لِلطّالِبِ aloud as one word until the missing alif stops feeling like a typo.
• بِـ versus مَعَ is the pair to drill: بِالسِّكّينِ “with a knife” (instrument), مَعَ أَخي “with my brother” (company).
• Ignore for now which nouns are diptotes. Recognize two families - foreign or feminine proper names, and مَفاعِل-shaped plurals - and let lesson 41 do the rest.
• Do not expect a preposition to map onto one English word. Arabic verbs pick their own prepositions and you will learn those pairs verb by verb, starting in lesson 30.
• Practise the endings mid-sentence, not at the end of one. In pause the final vowel disappears, so a phrase you always say in isolation teaches you nothing about the case.

In short

Lesson 2 gave you a خَبَر that was one word: البَيْتُ كَبيرٌ. That is only the smallest of its three shapes. A خَبَر can also be a whole clause (البَيْتُ بابُهُ واسِعٌ, “the house - its door is wide”) or a preposition with its noun (الكِتابُ عَلى الطّاوِلَةِ). Nothing new is added to the sentence: it is still مُبْتَدَأ plus خَبَر, still verbless, still a جُمْلَةٌ اسْمِيَّةٌ. Only the second slot has grown.

The third shape is the one that pays off immediately, because it is how Arabic says “I have”. There is no verb that does the work of English “to have” - not at A1, not later. Instead you take a prepositional predicate, move it to the front, and let the thing owned follow as an indefinite subject: عِنْدي كِتابٌ, “with-me a-book”. The same move gives you “there is”: في الغُرْفَةِ رَجُلٌ، هُناكَ مُشْكِلَةٌ. Learn one small mechanism here and two of the most frequent sentence types in Arabic come with it.

The rule

1. The خَبَر comes in three shapes. Arabic grammar names them, and the names are worth knowing because every later lesson uses them.

• خَبَرٌ مُفْرَدٌ - a single word, a noun or an adjective, normally indefinite, and مَرْفوع: البَيْتُ كَبيرٌ، سَميرٌ مُهَنْدِسٌ. This is lesson 2.
• خَبَرٌ جُمْلَةٌ - a complete sentence doing the job of the predicate: البَيْتُ بابُهُ واسِعٌ، الوَلَدُ يَلْعَبُ في الحَديقَةِ.
• خَبَرٌ شِبْهُ جُمْلَةٍ - “quasi-sentence”: a preposition plus its noun (جارٌّ ومَجْرورٌ) or a place/time word (ظَرْفٌ): الكِتابُ عَلى الطّاوِلَةِ، المُدَرِّسُ في الصَّفِّ، الحَقيبَةُ تَحْتَ السَّريرِ.

2. A خَبَر that is a clause needs a pronoun pointing back. In البَيْتُ بابُهُ واسِعٌ the predicate clause is بابُهُ واسِعٌ, itself a miniature nominal sentence with its own مُبْتَدَأ (بابُهُ) and خَبَر (واسِعٌ). What ties it to البَيْتُ is the little ـهُ on بابُ. That pronoun is called الرّابِط, “the link”, and it is compulsory: remove it and the two halves fall apart. It agrees with the outer مُبْتَدَأ in gender and number: الشَّقَّةُ نَوافِذُها كَبيرَةٌ، الطّالِبُ خَطُّهُ جَميلٌ، المَدينَةُ شَوارِعُها نَظيفَةٌ.

You write no case ending on the clause as a whole - a sentence has no vowel to carry. The grammarians say it stands فِي مَحَلِّ رَفْعٍ, “in the position of the nominative”. For now that is a label, not a task.

3. Word order flips when the مُبْتَدَأ is indefinite. The default is مُبْتَدَأ then خَبَر. But lesson 2 also said the مُبْتَدَأ must be definite - and “I have a book” needs an indefinite one, because the book is new information. Arabic resolves the conflict by moving the شِبْهُ الجُمْلَةِ to the front:

عِنْدي كِتابٌ. / لي أَخٌ. / في الغُرْفَةِ رَجُلٌ.

The fronted predicate is now a خَبَرٌ مُقَدَّمٌ (“advanced predicate”) and the noun behind it a مُبْتَدَأٌ مُؤَخَّرٌ (“delayed subject”). This is not stylistic preference and not emphasis: with an indefinite subject the fronting is required. *كِتابٌ عِنْدي is not a sentence a native writer produces.

With a definite subject both orders are available and both are normal: الكِتابُ عِنْدي and عِنْدي الكِتابُ. Then, though, the meaning is different - “the book is with me”, about a book already under discussion. So عِنْدي الكِتابُ can never be your translation of “I have a book”.

4. The delayed subject stays مَرْفوع and indefinite. It is the subject of the sentence, not an object of anything, so it wears ـٌ: عِنْدي كِتابٌ، لي أَخٌ، في الغُرْفَةِ رَجُلٌ. Watch the two different endings sitting side by side in one short sentence: the noun after the preposition is مَجْرور (الغُرْفَةِ, with a kasra) while the delayed subject is مَرْفوع (رَجُلٌ, with tanwīn ḍamma). Neither one ever takes a fatḥa here.

5. عِنْدَ and مَعَ keep their fatḥa. Both are ظَرْف words - a place word and an accompaniment word - and both stand in the accusative, which is where their fatḥa comes from. It stays put in front of the attached pronouns: عِنْدَكَ، عِنْدَهُ، مَعَنا، never *عِنْدُكَ or *عِنْدِكَ. The one exception is the first person, where the ـي pulls a kasra in front of itself here as it does everywhere else (lesson 7): the د of عِنْدي and the ع of مَعي carry that kasra, not a fatḥa - never *عِنْدَي، *مَعَي. The only other place عِنْدَ changes shape is after مِنْ, which pulls it into the genitive: مِنْ عِنْدِهِ “from his place”. As always a final short vowel is inaudible at a pause: someone answering هَلْ عِنْدَهُ قَلَمٌ؟ with a bare نَعَمْ، عِنْدَهُ stops on عِنْدَهْ. The ḍamma is still written.

Meanwhile لِـ behaves as lesson 7 described: it switches its kasra to a fatḥa in front of every suffix except the first person - لَكَ، لَهُ، لَها، لَنا، لَهُمْ, but لي.

6. Three words for “have”, and they are not interchangeable. English flattens all of this into one verb; Arabic makes you choose.

• عِنْدَ - “in one’s keeping”. Things you possess or have available: money, a car, a question, an appointment, time, an idea. عِنْدي سَيّارَةٌ، عِنْدَنا اِمْتِحانٌ غَدًا، عِنْدَها فِكْرَةٌ. This is the everyday default for objects.
• لِـ - ownership in the fuller sense, plus kinship, rights and inherent properties. Relatives take لِـ, not عِنْدَ: لي أَخٌ “I have a brother”. So do rights and characteristics: لَهُ حَقٌّ في ذٰلِكَ، لَها صَوْتٌ جَميلٌ، لِلْمَدينَةِ تاريخٌ طَويلٌ.
• مَعَ - “on me right now”, physically in hand or in pocket. هَلْ مَعَكَ قَلَمٌ؟ asks whether you are carrying a pen this second; هَلْ عِنْدَكَ قَلَمٌ؟ asks whether you own one. مَعي المِفْتاحُ means the key is on my person.

The line between عِنْدَ and لِـ is not absolute in modern usage, and عِنْدي أَخٌ is heard. But the pairs عِنْدي سَيّارَةٌ / لي أَخٌ are the safe, standard defaults, and كِتابٌ لي “a book of mine” (lesson 7) is only ever لِـ.

7. Followed by a noun instead of a pronoun. All three take a full noun as easily as a suffix, and the noun that follows is مَجْرور with a kasra: عِنْدَ الطَّبيبِ وَقْتٌ، مَعَ سَميرٍ حَقيبَةٌ، لِـ الطُّلّابِ حُقوقٌ - written as one word, لِلطُّلّابِ. After لِـ that kasra comes from the preposition itself (lesson 16); after عِنْدَ and مَعَ it comes from a construct, the إِضافَة of lesson 20. Same visible result either way.

8. هُناكَ for “there is”. هُناكَ is the “there” of lesson 13, the far demonstrative of place, and modern Arabic uses it exactly as English uses existential “there”:

هُناكَ مُشْكِلَةٌ. / هُناكَ مَطْعَمٌ قَريبٌ. / هُناكَ طالِبٌ في المَكْتَبِ.

Structurally it is the same sentence you have just learned: a fronted predicate with a delayed indefinite subject, still مَرْفوع, still tanwīn’d. The word هُناكَ itself never changes - no gender, no number, no ending. And its subject is normally indefinite: *هُناكَ الرَّجُلُ فِي الغُرْفَةِ is not “the man is in the room”; for that you write الرَّجُلُ فِي الغُرْفَةِ, a plain nominal sentence with a definite subject.

Where the location is stated, plain fronting is just as good and slightly more elegant: في الغُرْفَةِ رَجُلٌ، أَمامَ البَيْتِ حَديقَةٌ صَغيرَةٌ. Use هُناكَ when there is no location to name.

9. أَنا عِنْدي - grammatical, but not the default. Learners add the pronoun because English has “I”. Arabic does not need it: the ـي inside عِنْدي already says who. Written out, أَنا عِنْدي سَيّارَةٌ is in fact a خَبَرٌ جُمْلَةٌ from rule 2 - أَنا is the مُبْتَدَأ, عِنْدي سَيّارَةٌ is a whole sentence serving as its predicate, and the ي is the link pronoun. So it is well formed, and it reads as contrastive: “I have a car (whatever the others have).” As a neutral statement, drop أَنا.

10. Not in this lesson. Saying you do not have something needs لَيْسَ عِنْدي, which is lesson 23. Saying you had something needs كانَ عِنْدي, lesson 32 - and that one also changes the endings. The formal يوجَدُ / لا يوجَدُ “there exists”, a passive verb, waits for lesson 52. Everything on this page is present, positive and verbless.

Forms & patterns

The three shapes of خَبَر

عِنْدَ، لِـ، مَعَ with the attached pronouns

The remaining four persons are built the same way and are left out only to keep the table readable: عِنْدَكُنَّ، عِنْدَهُنَّ، لَكُنَّ، لَهُنَّ، مَعَكُنَّ، مَعَهُنَّ for the feminine plural, and عِنْدَكُما، عِنْدَهُما، لَكُما، لَهُما، مَعَكُما، مَعَهُما for the dual. Note that هُ keeps its ḍamma throughout here, because a fatḥa comes before it (lesson 7).

The fronted pattern, slot by slot

Choosing between the three

Examples

Common mistakes

• عِنْدي الكِتابُ. (meaning “I have a book”) -> عِنْدي كِتابٌ. - The delayed subject must stay indefinite. With الـ you have said “I have the book”, about one already known to your listener.
• كِتابٌ عِنْدي. -> عِنْدي كِتابٌ. - An indefinite subject cannot open the sentence. The شِبْهُ الجُمْلَةِ has to be fronted; that is what licenses the indefinite noun.
• عِنْدي كِتابًا. -> عِنْدي كِتابٌ. - كِتابٌ is the مُبْتَدَأ of the sentence, not an object. There is no verb here to put anything in the accusative.
• أَنا أَمْلِكُ قَلَمًا. (meaning “I have a pen”) -> مَعي قَلَمٌ. - Do not hunt for a verb “to have”. مَلَكَ - يَمْلِكُ “to own” does exist and is right for real ownership (يَمْلِكُ سَيّارَةً “he owns a car”), but it is too heavy for a pen in your pocket, and it will not translate “I have a question / an exam / a brother” at all.
• أَنا عِنْدي سَيّارَةٌ. (as a neutral statement) -> عِنْدي سَيّارَةٌ. - The ـي already names the owner. أَنا is grammatical but adds contrast you probably did not intend.
• عِنْدُكَ وَقْتٌ؟ / لِكَ بَيْتٌ جَميلٌ. -> هَلْ عِنْدَكَ وَقْتٌ؟ / لَكَ بَيْتٌ جَميلٌ. - Both words wear a fatḥa in front of a suffix: عِنْدَ keeps the one it always has, and لِـ swaps its kasra for one. The exception is the first-person ـي, which takes a kasra in front of itself in all three: لي، عِنْدي، مَعي.
• مَعي أَخٌ في القاهِرَةِ. (meaning “I have a brother in Cairo”) -> لي أَخٌ في القاهِرَةِ. - مَعَ would mean he is standing next to you. Relatives belong to لِـ.
• هُناكَ الرَّجُلُ في الغُرْفَةِ. -> في الغُرْفَةِ رَجُلٌ. / الرَّجُلُ في الغُرْفَةِ. - هُناكَ introduces something new, so its noun is indefinite. A definite noun makes a plain nominal sentence instead.
• البَيْتُ بابُ واسِعٌ. -> البَيْتُ بابُهُ واسِعٌ. - A clause used as a خَبَر needs the link pronoun tying it back to the مُبْتَدَأ. Without ـهُ the two halves are unrelated.
• الكِتابُ عَلى الطّاوِلَةُ. -> الكِتابُ عَلى الطّاوِلَةِ. - Inside the شِبْهُ الجُمْلَةِ the preposition still governs its noun: kasra, not ḍamma.

Tips

• Translate “I have” as “with me is” in your head, and the word order sorts itself out before you write anything: with-me a-book, to-me a-brother, in-the-room a-man.
• Fix the two endings as a pair: kasra behind the preposition, tanwīn ḍamma on the thing owned - في الغُرْفَةِ رَجُلٌ. If both your words end alike, one of them is wrong.
• Drill the three columns as three short chants - عِنْدي، عِنْدَكَ، عِنْدَكِ، عِنْدَهُ… then لي، لَكَ، لَكِ، لَهُ… then مَعي، مَعَكَ، مَعَكِ، مَعَهُ… They are the same twelve endings you already learned in lesson 7, so this is revision, not new memorising.
• Sort your vocabulary as you meet it: cars, money, time and questions go with عِنْدَ; brothers, sisters, rights and voices go with لِـ; keys, phones and pens in your pocket go with مَعَ.
• Whenever a sentence of yours starts with an indefinite noun, stop and reverse it. That single check catches most errors this pattern produces.
• Use هُناكَ freely for “there is” - it is unmarked, modern and invariable - but prefer plain fronting when you are naming the place anyway.
• Ignore for now the emphatic fronting of literary style, where the order itself carries the rhetoric (لِلَّهِ الأَمْرُ and the like). It is real, and nothing at A1 needs it.
• Do not try to negate any of this yet. لَيْسَ عِنْدي reshuffles the endings, and it has a lesson of its own waiting at 28.

In short

Arabic has two tenses, and you already know one of them. Lesson 14 gave you المُضارِع, the present, which marks the person with a prefix - أَكْتُبُ، تَكْتُبُ، يَكْتُبُ. The past, الماضي, does the opposite: the stem stays put and the person is bolted on at the end - كَتَبْتُ، كَتَبْتَ، كَتَبَ. Ten endings for the singular and plural, three more for the dual, and that is the entire tense. There is no “did”, no auxiliary, no irregular list to memorise.

Two things make this lesson worth slowing down for. First, the bare form كَتَبَ is not just “he wrote” - it is the shape every dictionary uses as its headword, so learning the past is learning how to look verbs up at all. Second, this is where the vowel marks stop being decoration. Written without them, كتبت is four different words: “I wrote”, “you wrote” (to a man), “you wrote” (to a woman) and “she wrote”. Only the تَشْكيل - or the surrounding sentence - tells them apart. Everything the path has said about vowelling collects its first real payment here.

The rule

1. The dictionary form is a finished sentence. Arabic has no infinitive. Where an English dictionary prints “to write”, an Arabic one prints كَتَبَ, which literally means “he wrote”. That form is the raw stem with nothing added, and it is the base you build all ten persons from. Three letters, three vowels: كَتَبَ. When this path or any dictionary names a verb, it names it in this shape.

2. الماضي is مَبْنِيٌّ - its ending never varies with the syntax. Nouns change their final vowel according to their job in the sentence (مَرْفوع، مَنْصوب، مَجْرور), and lesson 14’s present tense will later change its ending for mood. الماضي does neither. It is مَبْنِيٌّ, “built” - fixed. كَتَبَ ends in a fatḥa as subject-verb, after a question word, at the start of a sentence, in the middle of one, everywhere. That fatḥa is part of the word, not a case ending you may drop when speaking carefully:

• كَتَبَ الدَّرْسَ. - he wrote the lesson
• مَتى كَتَبَ الدَّرْسَ؟ - when did he write the lesson?

3. Consonant suffixes force a سُكون on the last radical. Six of the endings begin with a consonant - ـتُ، ـتَ، ـتِ، ـتُمْ، ـتُنَّ، ـنا - plus ـنَ for هُنَّ and ـتُما for the dual. Arabic does not tolerate the fatḥa of كَتَبَ sitting in front of them, so the third radical goes silent:

كَتَبَ + تُ -> كَتَبْتُ ، كَتَبَ + نا -> كَتَبْنا ، كَتَبَ + نَ -> كَتَبْنَ

Say it as a rhythm: the stem closes into one shut syllable, كَتَبْ, and the ending lands on top of it - كَتَبْتُ، كَتَبْنا، كَتَبْتُمْ. This single sukūn rule generates seven of the ten forms, and the dual كَتَبْتُما with them.

4. Vowel-initial suffixes leave the fatḥa alone. The other endings begin with a vowel, and there the last radical keeps its fatḥa: هِيَ كَتَبَتْ، هُما كَتَبا، هُما كَتَبَتا. The one to look at twice is هُمْ: the last radical rounds to a ḍamma and the و carries it as a long vowel - كَتَبوا. The ت of كَتَبَتْ is تاءُ التَّأْنيثِ السّاكِنَةُ, the feminine ت, and it carries no vowel of its own. (If the next word begins with الـ, that sukūn picks up a helping kasra so the two words can link: ذَهَبَتِ الطّالِبَةُ إِلَى المَدْرَسَةِ. You will hear it constantly; it changes nothing about the form itself.)

5. The silent alif in كَتَبوا. The ا at the end of كَتَبوا is not pronounced and not a vowel. It is a pure spelling device with a name - الأَلِفُ الفارِقَةُ, “the separating alif” - whose only job is to mark the و as واوُ الجَماعَةِ, the plural wāw, rather than a root letter or the word وَ (“and”). Whenever a verb ends in the plural wāw, that alif follows automatically: كَتَبوا، دَرَسوا، ذَهَبوا، جَلَسوا، فَهِموا. Never *كَتَبو. Treat وا as one indivisible two-letter ending and you will never drop it. (It does disappear once an object pronoun is attached to the verb - كَتَبوهُ - but object pronouns are lesson 29; until then, always write the alif.)

6. The ending already says who, so the pronoun is optional. كَتَبْتُ can only mean “I wrote”; no other person of the verb ends in ـْتُ. Adding أَنا is therefore not required, and sprinkling it over every sentence is one of the loudest marks of a beginner:

• ذَهَبْتُ إِلَى السّوقِ. - I went to the market (normal)
• أَنا ذَهَبْتُ إِلَى السّوقِ. - I went to the market (contrast: I did, not you)

The independent pronoun of lesson 6 goes in only when you want that emphasis, or when the sentence sets one person against another: أَنا دَرَسْتُ وهُوَ لَعِبَ. In plain narration, leave it out.

7. The middle vowel is the verb’s own property - only the dictionary knows it. In the dictionary form of an active Form I verb the first radical takes a fatḥa and the last one takes that fixed fatḥa. The middle radical is where verbs differ, and it gives three patterns:

Little in the meaning predicts which one you get - دَرَسَ and شَرِبَ are ordinary transitive verbs with different vowels. You cannot derive it, so you look it up and store it with the word. The good news is that it is stable: whatever vowel the middle radical has in كَتَبَ, it keeps in every one of the thirteen forms. شَرِبَ gives شَرِبْتُ، شَرِبَتْ، شَرِبْنا، شَرِبوا - the kasra never turns into a fatḥa. فَعُلَ is the rare one, and it is mostly qualities rather than actions (“became big”, “became good”).

8. Learn the past and present stems as one item. The past middle vowel does not predict the present one either: كَتَبَ gives يَكْتُبُ with a ḍamma, but جَلَسَ gives يَجْلِسُ with a kasra and ذَهَبَ gives يَذْهَبُ with a fatḥa. Dictionaries print both for exactly this reason. From now on, when you meet a new verb, write down the pair - كَتَبَ / يَكْتُبُ - never just one. Two tendencies help a little: فَعِلَ verbs mostly take a fatḥa in the present - شَرِبَ، سَمِعَ، فَهِمَ، لَعِبَ give يَشْرَبُ، يَسْمَعُ، يَفْهَمُ، يَلْعَبُ - and the rare فَعُلَ verbs always take a ḍamma (كَبُرَ / يَكْبُرُ).

9. كتبت: one skeleton, four words. Strip the vowel marks and كَتَبْتُ (I), كَتَبْتَ (you m.), كَتَبْتِ (you f.) and كَتَبَتْ (she) are all written كتبت. Real Arabic prints them that way. Two of them are especially treacherous because they differ only in where the sukūn sits:

• كَتَبْتَ - you wrote (to a man): sukūn on the ب, fatḥa on the ت
• كَتَبَتْ - she wrote: fatḥa on the ب, sukūn on the ت

The same two letters, the same two marks, swapped. In a real text the surrounding words settle it: a noun subject standing after the verb can only be third person - كتبت الطالبة رسالة is “the student wrote a letter” - and elsewhere it is who the paragraph is talking to, or about, that decides. That skill is the pronunciation guide’s business. Here, do the opposite: vocalize everything you write, out loud and on paper, until the two rhythms - كَتَبْتَ with its shut middle syllable against كَتَبَتْ with its open one - are two different sounds in your head rather than one ambiguous spelling.

10. What the tense actually means. الماضي reports an event as finished. It covers the English simple past (“I studied yesterday”), and very often the present perfect too (“I have already studied”), because Arabic does not split those apart. What it never does is describe an action in progress - “I was writing” is not الماضي on its own. String past verbs together and you have narration, which is what this tense is for:

دَخَلْتُ الغُرْفَةَ وجَلَسْتُ وفَتَحْتُ الكِتابَ. - I entered the room, sat down and opened the book.

Everything else about the past comes later: negating it with ما or لَمْ is lesson 37, “was/were” with كانَ is lesson 32, the sharpened “has just done” with قَدْ is lesson 45, and the passive كُتِبَ is lesson 52.

11. Sound verbs here, awkward roots later. Every verb in this lesson is الفِعْلُ الصَّحيحُ السّالِمُ - three solid consonants that never mutate. Verbs whose middle or last radical is و or ي reshape their stem in the past (قالَ، باعَ، مَشى) and are lessons 50 and 56; hamzated and doubled roots are lesson 49; the derived patterns like دَرَّسَ and اِسْتَقْبَلَ are lessons 46-53. None of that touches what you are learning now, because the thirteen endings in the table below are the same for every verb in the language. Only the stem in front of them changes - and with a weak root the stem and the ending can fuse (lessons 50-56).

Forms & patterns

Form I sound verb كَتَبَ (ك-ت-ب, “to write”) - the ten singular and plural persons:

The dual (lesson 12), three cells - no first-person dual exists:

The three middle-vowel classes, side by side in the cells that show the vowel best:

What to write in your vocabulary notebook - both stems, always:

One unvocalized skeleton, four readings - the reason this path prints the vowels:

Examples

Common mistakes

• كَتَبو -> كَتَبوا - the plural wāw always drags الأَلِفُ الفارِقَةُ behind it. Write وا as a single two-letter ending and the error cannot happen.
• كَتَبَتُ -> كَتَبْتُ - a consonant ending forces a sukūn on the last radical. There is no vowel between the ب and the ت.
• كَتَبَتْ رِسالَةً meaning “you wrote a letter” -> كَتَبْتَ رِسالَةً - كَتَبَتْ is “she wrote”. The two marks are simply swapped: sukūn on the ب for “you (m)”, sukūn on the ت for “she”.
• كَتَبْ -> كَتَبَ - the final fatḥa is the form itself, not a droppable case ending. (The vowelless ending you may have heard is a spoken-dialect habit, not الفُصْحى.)
• شَرَبْتُ -> شَرِبْتُ - the middle vowel belongs to the verb, not to the person. شَرِبَ is a فَعِلَ verb in every single cell.
• كَتَبْتُنَ -> كَتَبْتُنَّ - the ن of أَنْتُنَّ and هُنَّ is doubled; without the shadda the word does not exist.
• كَتَبْنا meaning “they (f) wrote” -> كَتَبْنَ - ـْنا is نَحْنُ, “we”. هُنَّ takes the bare ـْنَ with no alif.
• البَناتُ دَرَسوا -> البَناتُ دَرَسْنَ - a human feminine plural takes the feminine plural ending. The lesson-15 rule that lets you use a feminine singular applies to non-human plurals, not to girls.
• البِنْتانِ كَتَبا -> البِنْتانِ كَتَبَتا - the dual keeps its gender in the verb, even though the pronoun هُما does not.
• أَنا ذَهَبْتُ إِلَى السّوقِ وأَنا رَجَعْتُ بَعْدَ ساعَةٍ. -> ذَهَبْتُ إِلَى السّوقِ ورَجَعْتُ بَعْدَ ساعَةٍ. - the ending already carries “I”. Repeating أَنا turns plain narration into insistent contrast.

Tips

• Memorise the endings, not the verb. Chant ـْتُ، ـْتَ، ـْتِ، ـَ، ـَتْ، ـْنا، ـْتُمْ، ـْتُنَّ، ـوا، ـْنَ once and you can conjugate any verb in Arabic: the derived forms take exactly the same set, and weak roots take it onto a reshaped stem (lessons 50-56).
• Group the ten by shape: six start with a ت - the five “I / you” persons plus هِيَ’s ـَتْ - two start with a ن (نَحْنُ ـْنا and هُنَّ ـْنَ), and the two masculine third-person cells, كَتَبَ and كَتَبوا, carry neither. Three little families beat one flat list.
• Vocalize كتبت by hand every time you write it, at least for a week. This is the first place in the path where تَشْكيل earns its keep, and the habit is what makes reading real, unvowelled Arabic possible later.
• Every new verb enters your notebook as a pair, كَتَبَ / يَكْتُبُ. Recording only the past leaves you unable to say the present, and the vowel is genuinely unguessable.
• Narrate yesterday out loud in the first person: ذَهَبْتُ، دَرَسْتُ، شَرِبْتُ، عَمِلْتُ، رَجَعْتُ. Five verbs and a couple of time words already make a paragraph.
• Ignore for now: how to negate a past verb (lesson 37), how to say “was” (lesson 32), and anything with a و or ي inside the root (lessons 50-56). Sound verbs first.
• Do not hunt for a continuous past. “I was writing” needs a construction Arabic builds differently; الماضي on its own always reports a completed event.

In short

Lesson 2 gave you a sentence with no verb in it (البَيْتُ كَبيرٌ), and lessons 14 and 22 gave you verbs that carry their own subject inside them (أَذْهَبُ، ذَهَبْتُ). This lesson joins the two halves: a verb with a noun as its subject. Arabic’s neutral, unmarked way of doing that is to put the verb first - ذَهَبَ الطُّلّابُ, word for word “went the students”. A sentence that opens with a verb is called الجُمْلَةُ الفِعْلِيَّةُ, and the noun that does the action is الفاعِل.

The catch, and the whole point of this lesson, is that Arabic gives you two orders and they do not agree the same way. Put the verb first and it stays singular, matching only the gender of the subject: ذَهَبَ الطُّلّابُ. Put the subject first and the verb agrees with it fully, in gender and number: الطُّلّابُ ذَهَبوا. Same meaning, same words, two different verb forms. Get this asymmetry into your ear now and you will never write the sentence that Arab grammarians nicknamed after a plague of fleas.

The rule

1. What a verbal sentence is. A جُمْلَة فِعْلِيَّة begins with the verb. Its two obligatory parts are:

• الفِعْل - the verb: ذَهَبَ، وَصَلَ، يَجْلِسُ.
• الفاعِل - the doer, the noun (or pronoun) that performs the action: الطُّلّابُ، الرَّسائِلُ.

Anything else - a prepositional phrase, a time word - normally follows them: ذَهَبَ الطُّلّابُ إِلَى المَدْرَسَةِ. In this lesson every verb is either intransitive or takes its complement through a preposition, so that الفاعِل is the only noun whose ending you have to think about.

2. Verb first is the default. In news writing, narrative and neutral statements MSA reaches for فِعْل + فاعِل before anything else: وَصَلَ الضُّيوفُ. English cannot do this at all, so the order feels strange for about a week and then stops feeling like anything. The subject-first order الطُّلّابُ ذَهَبوا is equally correct Arabic and very common in modern prose, but it is not neutral: it puts the spotlight on the subject, in the way English does with “the students - they went”. Start a plain statement with the verb.

3. Verb first: the verb stays singular and matches gender only. This is the rule that has no English parallel. When the verb comes before its فاعِل, it is always singular, whatever the number of the subject. The only thing it copies is gender - the ت of the feminine:

• masculine subject, any number: ذَهَبَ الطّالِبُ / ذَهَبَ الطّالِبانِ / ذَهَبَ الطُّلّابُ
• feminine subject, any number: ذَهَبَتِ الطّالِبَةُ / ذَهَبَتِ الطّالِبَتانِ / ذَهَبَتِ الطّالِباتُ

Read the two columns down. The verb never moves. Number lives in the noun and nowhere else, so ذَهَبَ الطُّلّابُ is not “he went, the students” - the verb is simply neutral about number here, and the plural noun says everything.

The feminine ت is not optional in modern usage. A group of women takes it exactly as one woman does: وَصَلَتِ المُعَلِّماتُ, never *وَصَلَ المُعَلِّماتُ.

4. Subject first: full agreement. Move the noun in front and the verb must match it completely

• gender and number, using the whole paradigm of lesson 18:

• الطّالِبُ ذَهَبَ - الطّالِبَةُ ذَهَبَتْ

• الطّالِبانِ ذَهَبا - الطّالِبَتانِ ذَهَبَتا

• الطُّلّابُ ذَهَبوا - الطّالِباتُ ذَهَبْنَ

There is a reason, and it is worth twenty rules of memorization. When the noun comes first, the sentence is really a nominal sentence of the kind you built in lesson 2: الطُّلّابُ is the مُبْتَدَأ, and everything after it is the predicate. The verb ذَهَبوا already contains its own subject - the و is the pronoun “they” - and that pronoun points back at الطُّلّاب. So the verb is not agreeing with a following noun; it is carrying a pronoun, and a pronoun is always fully specified. Verb-first sentences have no such pronoun, because the real doer is standing right there behind the verb.

5. Non-human plurals ignore the whole thing. Lesson 11 taught that a plural of غَيْرِ العاقِل - things, animals, ideas - takes feminine singular agreement. That rule outranks this one and applies in both orders:

• verb first: وَصَلَتِ الرَّسائِلُ. / تَصِلُ الطّائِراتُ فِي الصَّباحِ.
• subject first: الكُتُبُ وَصَلَتْ. / السَّيّاراتُ وَصَلَتْ.

For a non-human plural, then, the two orders look the same, and you have one form to worry about instead of two. Never *الرَّسائِلُ وَصَلْنَ - ـْنَ is for groups of women.

6. الفاعِل is مَرْفوع - always. The subject of a verbal sentence carries the nominative ending, and a word list or a dictionary will not show it to you. طالب in your vocabulary notebook becomes الطّالِبُ or طالِبٌ the moment it enters a sentence:

• singular and broken plural: ḍamma - الطّالِبُ، طالِبٌ، الطُّلّابُ، طُلّابٌ
• sound feminine plural: ḍamma - الطّالِباتُ، طالِباتٌ
• dual: the ending ـانِ - الطّالِبانِ، طالِبانِ
• sound masculine plural: the ending ـونَ - المُعَلِّمونَ، مُعَلِّمونَ

Two of these are the traps. المُعَلِّمينَ is a real word, but it is not a فاعِل; as the subject of a verb it must be المُعَلِّمونَ. And a fatḥa on the subject - *ذَهَبَ الطّالِبَ - turns it into something the verb is done to, which is the topic of lesson 29 and is not what you mean here.

7. The junction kasra: ذَهَبَتِ الطّالِباتُ. The feminine past ending ـَتْ has a sukūn. The article الـ opens with هَمْزَةُ الوَصْل, which disappears in the flow of speech and leaves its lām - or, before a sun letter, the doubled consonant - with a sukūn of its own. Two sukūns cannot meet: this is اِلْتِقاءُ السّاكِنَيْنِ. Arabic breaks the collision by giving the first one a kasra:

• ذَهَبَتْ + الطّالِباتُ → ذَهَبَتِ الطّالِباتُ
• وَصَلَتْ + الرَّسائِلُ → وَصَلَتِ الرَّسائِلُ
• خَرَجَتْ + النِّساءُ → خَرَجَتِ النِّساءُ

It is audible - the extra vowel is clearly heard - but it is visible only in vocalized text, so in an ordinary newspaper the word still looks like ذهبت. The sukūn comes straight back when the next word does not begin with هَمْزَةُ الوَصْل: ذَهَبَتْ إِلَى المَدْرَسَةِ، وَصَلَتْ أَمْسِ. Nothing like this happens with masculine ذَهَبَ, which already ends in a vowel.

8. Pronoun subjects need no noun at all. If the doer is a pronoun, the verb form is the subject: ذَهَبْتُ، ذَهَبْنا، ذَهَبوا. You do not add an independent pronoun to supply it - ذَهَبَ هُمْ is not Arabic - and you do not need one in front of it either. أَنا ذَهَبْتُ is possible, but like أَنا أَكْتُبُ in lesson 14 it is emphasis, not grammar.

9. The rule holds under everything you know so far. A question word or a particle in front does not change what happens between the verb and its subject:

• هَلْ وَصَلَ الضُّيوفُ؟
• مَتى رَجَعَتِ المُعَلِّماتُ؟
• جَلَسَ الرِّجالُ تَحْتَ الشَّجَرَةِ وضَحِكوا.

That last one shows the natural rhythm of Arabic prose: once the subject has been named, the following verbs in the chain refer back to it with a pronoun inside them, so they take the full plural form.

10. The error with a name. Saying *ذَهَبوا الطُّلّابُ - a fully agreeing verb standing before its noun subject - is the classic mistake, and Arab grammarians labelled it أَكَلوني البَراغيثُ, “the fleas ate me”, after the shape of the sentence. A minority of old tribal dialects did it, and grammarians recorded that; standard written Arabic does not accept it. Choose one: verb first with a singular verb, or subject first with a full one.

11. Left for later. The noun that the action is done to - المَفْعولُ بِهِ, with its accusative ending - is lesson 29, and the sentences here avoid it. A verbal sentence with no mentioned doer at all (نائِبُ الفاعِل, “the letter was written”) is lesson 52. Past-tense sentences built on كانَ are lesson 32. The complete system of case endings and their sub-markers is lesson 40.

Forms & patterns

The core table. One verb, six subjects, two orders - the whole lesson is in the difference between the two right-hand columns.

The same asymmetry in the present tense - المُضارِع behaves exactly like الماضي here:

Human against non-human, on وَصَلَ. Note that the bottom two rows are identical across the columns: a plural of things has only one shape.

The ending on the فاعِل, definite and indefinite. This is the nominative and nothing else:

The junction kasra, before and after:

Left out here: everything the verb might govern after its subject - objects, adverbials of time and place, and the accusative endings they carry.

Examples

Common mistakes

• ذَهَبوا الطُّلّابُ إِلَى المَدْرَسَةِ. -> ذَهَبَ الطُّلّابُ إِلَى المَدْرَسَةِ. - this is أَكَلوني البَراغيثُ. Before its noun subject the verb is singular; the plural form ـوا already contains a subject of its own.
• ذَهَبَ الطّالِباتُ. -> ذَهَبَتِ الطّالِباتُ. - verb-first drops number, not gender. A feminine subject still pulls the ـَتْ onto the verb.
• ذَهَبَ الطّالِبَ. -> ذَهَبَ الطّالِبُ. - الفاعِل is مَرْفوع. A fatḥa here says the student was the thing that got gone, which is neither the meaning nor a possible reading of ذَهَبَ.
• ذَهَبَ المُعَلِّمينَ. -> ذَهَبَ المُعَلِّمونَ. - the nominative of a sound masculine plural is ـونَ. المُعَلِّمينَ is the form for other positions in the sentence.
• الطُّلّابُ ذَهَبَ. -> الطُّلّابُ ذَهَبوا. - the asymmetry runs one way only. Once the subject is in front, the verb must agree with it fully.
• ذَهَبا الطّالِبانِ. -> ذَهَبَ الطّالِبانِ. - the dual is no exception: a verb standing first is singular even when its subject is two people.
• الطّالِباتُ ذَهَبوا. -> الطّالِباتُ ذَهَبْنَ. - ـوا is for men and mixed groups. A group of women in front of its verb takes ـْنَ.
• الرَّسائِلُ وَصَلْنَ. -> الرَّسائِلُ وَصَلَتْ. - letters are غَيْرُ العاقِل, so the verb is feminine singular in either order. ـْنَ would make the letters into women.
• ذَهَبَتْ الطّالِباتُ. (pronounced with a sukūn) -> ذَهَبَتِ الطّالِباتُ. - two sukūns cannot meet across the article, so the ت takes a kasra. Write it and say it.
• ذَهَبَ هُمْ إِلَى السّوقِ. -> ذَهَبوا إِلَى السّوقِ. - a pronoun subject lives inside the verb, and a هُمْ standing after ذَهَبَ cannot do that job for it.

Tips

• Memorize the contrast as a two-line chant, not as a rule: ذَهَبَ الطُّلّابُ / الطُّلّابُ ذَهَبوا. Say it until the wrong pairing sounds off.
• Ask one question before you choose the verb form: “is the subject in front of me or behind me?” Behind → singular, gender only. In front → the full form from the paradigm.
• Default to verb first when you write. It is the neutral order, and it is also the easier one: you only ever need two shapes of the verb, the plain one and the one with ـَتْ.
• Watch the ending of the subject as closely as the verb. Most learner sentences that feel “off” to a reader are correct in agreement and wrong in the ـُ / ـونَ / ـانِ on the noun.
• For non-human plurals, stop thinking about this lesson entirely and think about lesson 11: one feminine singular verb, both orders, done.
• The kasra of ذَهَبَتِ الطّالِباتُ is worth practising out loud even though you will rarely see it printed. It is one of the small things that makes read-aloud Arabic sound right.
• Do not try to use this order with an object yet. Keep to verbs of going, arriving, sitting, working and playing, and let lesson 29 add the second noun.

In short

English has two ways to link a thing to its owner: “the house’s door” and “the door of the house”. Arabic has one, and it uses no linking word at all - you simply set the two nouns side by side in the order possessed-then-possessor: بابُ البَيْتِ. There is no word for “of” and no apostrophe; the whole grammar of the phrase is carried by the endings. This construction is called الإِضافَة, and it is everywhere: addresses, job titles, room names, dates, headlines. You cannot say “the university library” or “my brother’s car” without it.

What you have to learn is not the word order - that is one sentence long - but the three things the construction does to the endings. The first noun loses its article and its tanwīn, however definite it is. The second noun is locked into the genitive and never leaves it. And the whole phrase counts as definite or indefinite according to the second word, not the first. Get those three right and the rest of Arabic possession is free.

The rule

1. The two positions have names. The first noun - the thing possessed - is the مُضاف. The second noun - the possessor - is the مُضافٌ إِلَيْهِ. Word order is fixed and there is nothing between them:

• بابُ البَيْتِ - the door of the house (مُضاف = بابُ، مُضافٌ إِلَيْهِ = البَيْتِ)
• سَيّارَةُ المُديرِ - the manager’s car
• كِتابُ الطّالِبِ - the student’s book

English reads the two words in reverse (“the student’s book”), or in the same order with “of” inserted (“the book of the student”). Arabic inserts nothing. Note also that the relationship does not have to be ownership: غُرْفَةُ الطَّعامِ is a room for food, خاتَمُ ذَهَبٍ is a ring made of gold, بابُ البَيْتِ is a part of a whole. Arabic uses one construction for the lot.

2. Iron rule one: the مُضاف takes no الـ and no tanwīn. This is the rule learners break most often, because English says “the door of the house” and the hand reaches for the article. The first word of an إِضافَة is bare: no الـ on the front, no doubled sign at the end, just a single case vowel.

• بابٌ (a door) + البَيْتِ -> بابُ البَيْتِ - never *بابٌ البَيْتِ
• البابُ (the door) + البَيْتِ -> بابُ البَيْتِ - never *البابُ البَيْتِ

That single bare vowel is a signal you can read: a noun carrying one vowel, no article and no tanwīn, is nearly always announcing that another noun is coming right behind it. (The one common exception is the diptote, which refuses tanwīn for reasons of its own - lesson 41.)

3. Iron rule two: the مُضافٌ إِلَيْهِ is always مَجْرور. Whatever is happening in the rest of the sentence, the second term sits in the genitive and stays there. Its ending is a kasra - ـِ if it is definite, ـٍ if it is indefinite:

• بابُ البَيْتِ / بابُ بَيْتٍ
• سَيّارَةُ المُديرِ / سَيّارَةُ مُديرٍ

This is the one fixed point in the phrase. No verb, no preposition and no case in the outer sentence can move it. (One class of nouns shows this genitive with a fatḥa instead of a kasra - دِمَشْقَ below. Those are the diptotes of lesson 41; for now just accept the form as given.)

4. Iron rule three: definiteness comes from the second term. The مُضاف cannot carry الـ, so it cannot announce its own definiteness. The second word decides for the whole phrase:

• بابُ البَيْتِ - the door of the house (definite: the second term has الـ)
• بابُ بَيْتٍ - a door of a house (indefinite: the second term has tanwīn)

A proper name or a pronoun in second position also makes the phrase definite, because names and pronouns are definite in themselves: سَيّارَةُ مُحَمَّدٍ (Muhammad’s car), كِتابُهُ (his book). That last one is worth pausing on - every attached pronoun you learned in lesson 7 is the second term of an إِضافَة. You have been building constructs since then without being told.

5. Only the first word moves through the cases. Because the second term is frozen in the genitive, the outer sentence acts on the مُضاف alone. Take one construct and put it in all three slots:

• هٰذا بابُ البَيْتِ. - the خَبَر of a nominal sentence, so مَرْفوع
• أَغْلَقْتُ بابَ البَيْتِ. - direct object, so مَنْصوب
• المِفْتاحُ في بابِ البَيْتِ. - after a preposition, so مَجْرور

Three sentences, one word changing. Drill this trio out loud; it is the whole case behaviour of the construction.

6. Chains: any number of links, one article at the end. The مُضافٌ إِلَيْهِ can itself be the مُضاف of a further pair. Every middle word then obeys both rules at once - it is genitive (because it follows a مُضاف) and it is bare of article and tanwīn (because another noun follows it):

مِفْتاحُ بابِ بَيْتِ المُديرِ - the key to the door of the manager’s house

Only the last word may carry الـ, and only the last word decides the definiteness of the whole chain. Read a chain from its first word, adding “of” at each step. Chains of three or four are normal in writing; longer ones, and what happens when a quantifier joins in, are lesson 42.

7. The ة is heard as a ت inside an إِضافَة. A feminine first term keeps its ة in writing, but because the case vowel after it is now obligatory, the letter is pronounced as a full ت: مَدينَةُ دِمَشْقَ، مَكْتَبَةُ الجامِعَةِ، غُرْفَةُ الطَّعامِ. Said on its own, at the end of an utterance, مَدينَة is pronounced with a light final -a and the ت is not heard at all (that is the pausal form, which the pronunciation guide sets out in full). Two consequences:

• Do not rewrite the letter. It stays ة: مَدينَةُ دِمَشْقَ, never *مَدينَتُ دِمَشْقَ. Before a following noun the ة is only heard as ت. It is actually written ت in the dual (مَدينَتانِ) and before an attached pronoun (مَدينَتُها), but not here.
• Do not swallow it in speech. مَكْتَبَة الجامِعَة with two silent endings is dialect, not الفُصْحى.

8. The dual and the sound masculine plural drop their ن. Both endings end in a ن that exists only when the word stands free. As soon as the word becomes a مُضاف, the ن falls off:

• مُعَلِّمانِ -> مُعَلِّما المَدْرَسَةِ - the school’s two teachers
• مُعَلِّمَيْنِ -> مُعَلِّمَيِ المَدْرَسَةِ - the same, in the accusative or genitive
• مُعَلِّمونَ -> مُعَلِّمو المَدْرَسَةِ - the school’s teachers
• مُعَلِّمينَ -> مُعَلِّمي المَدْرَسَةِ - the same, in the accusative or genitive

The ـَيْ of the dual picks up a kasra when it runs straight into الـ, which is why you see مُعَلِّمَيِ. Two endings do not drop anything: the sound feminine plural simply loses its tanwīn like any other noun (مُعَلِّماتٌ -> مُعَلِّماتُ المَدْرَسَةِ), and so does a broken plural (كُتُبٌ -> كُتُبُ الطُّلّابِ).

9. An adjective goes after the whole construct - and its case tells you what it describes. Nothing may be wedged between the two terms, so a describing word has to wait until the construct is finished. That leaves a genuine ambiguity in English, which Arabic usually resolves with the ending:

• بابُ البَيْتِ الكَبيرُ - the big door of the house (nominative, matching بابُ)
• بابُ البَيْتِ الكَبيرِ - the door of the big house (genitive, matching البَيْتِ)

The adjective still obeys every rule of lesson 8: it agrees in gender, number, case and definiteness. Since a definite construct makes its first term definite too, an attributive adjective takes الـ either way - so the case vowel is often the only signal left, which is one more reason this path prints the endings. Gender and number help when they can: سَيّارَةُ المُديرِ الجَديدَةُ is the manager’s new car, سَيّارَةُ المُديرِ الجَديدِ is the new manager’s car. When the two terms happen to share their case as well - after a preposition, say - the phrase is simply ambiguous, and only the context decides.

If the construct is indefinite, the adjective is indefinite as well: بابُ بَيْتٍ كَبيرٌ (a big door of a house) against بابُ بَيْتٍ كَبيرٍ (a door of a big house).

10. What an إِضافَة is not. Two nouns in a row are not always a construct. If the first one carries الـ or tanwīn, you are looking at something else - a subject and its predicate (البَيْتُ كَبيرٌ), or a noun and its adjective (البَيْتُ الكَبيرُ). And Arabic does not translate English “of” with مِنْ in this sense: *بابٌ مِنَ البَيْتِ is not “the door of the house”.

Forms & patterns

One construct, all three slots - only the first word moves:

Definiteness is decided by the second term:

What entering the construct does to the first term:

Everyday pairs worth learning as single vocabulary items:

Chains - every middle word is bare and genitive, only the last word carries الـ:

The adjective after the construct, and what its ending points at:

Examples

Common mistakes

• البابُ البَيْتِ -> بابُ البَيْتِ - the first term of an إِضافَة never takes الـ, even when English says “the”. Its definiteness comes from the word after it.
• بابٌ البَيْتِ -> بابُ البَيْتِ - and it never takes tanwīn either. The مُضاف ends in one bare vowel, always.
• بابُ البَيْتُ -> بابُ البَيْتِ - the second term is مَجْرور no matter what the sentence around it is doing. It is the fixed point of the construction.
• بابُ الكَبيرُ البَيْتِ -> بابُ البَيْتِ الكَبيرُ - nothing may stand between the two terms. The adjective waits until the construct is complete.
• بابٌ مِنَ البَيْتِ -> بابُ البَيْتِ - Arabic does not translate the English “of” with a preposition here. The link is the bare word order and the genitive.
• مَدينَةٌ دِمَشْقَ -> مَدينَةُ دِمَشْقَ - a feminine first term drops its tanwīn like any other, and the ة is then pronounced as a full ت.
• مَدينَتُ دِمَشْقَ -> مَدينَةُ دِمَشْقَ - but do not rewrite the letter. The ة is heard as a ت and still written as a ة; it is really written ت only in the dual (مَدينَتانِ) and before an attached pronoun (مَدينَتُها).
• مُعَلِّمونَ المَدْرَسَةِ -> مُعَلِّمو المَدْرَسَةِ - the ن of the sound masculine plural drops before the second term.
• مُعَلِّمانِ المَدْرَسَةِ -> مُعَلِّما المَدْرَسَةِ - the same for the dual, in both its forms: مُعَلِّما and مُعَلِّمَيِ.
• بابُ البَيْتِ كَبيرٌ (meaning “the big door of the house”) -> بابُ البَيْتِ الكَبيرُ - a definite construct takes a definite adjective. Without الـ the words are a full sentence: “the door of the house is big”.

Tips

• Learn to read the signal, not just the rule: a noun with a single case vowel, no article and no tanwīn is nearly always telling you that another noun is coming. Do not stop at it.
• Translate a construct backwards into English and check that it makes sense: بابُ البَيْتِ -> “door - of the house”. If your English needs “of”, your Arabic needs nothing.
• Drill the three-slot trio (هٰذا بابُ البَيْتِ / أَغْلَقْتُ بابَ البَيْتِ / في بابِ البَيْتِ) with five different constructs. When only the first word moves without thinking, you have it.
• Store real compounds as whole vocabulary items - غُرْفَةُ النَّوْمِ، رَقْمُ الهاتِفِ، نِهايَةُ الأُسْبوعِ - rather than assembling them each time. Half of everyday Arabic is إِضافات.
• You already know one kind: كِتابي، بَيْتُكَ، سَيّارَتُها. An attached pronoun is a second term, which is exactly why those words refuse الـ.
• When you want to attach two things to one owner, do not try to coordinate two first terms. Finish the construct, then continue with a pronoun: بابُ البَيْتِ ونافِذَتُهُ. The tidier ways of packing more into one phrase are lesson 42.
• In unvocalized text the endings vanish, but the construct is still visible: a missing ن on a plural (معلمو المدرسة), or a bare first noun followed by one carrying ال (باب البيت), give it away.
• Do not worry yet about second terms that take a fatḥa instead of a kasra - دِمَشْقَ، مِصْرَ، فاطِمَةَ. They are the diptotes of lesson 41; copy the form for now.

In short

English builds its “from there / made of that” words with a scatter of endings - Egypt/Egyptian, Lebanon/Lebanese, Japan/Japanese, gold/golden, science/scientific - and you simply have to know which one each word happens to take. Arabic has one ending for all of it: ـِيٌّ, a kasra plus a doubled ya. Add it to a country, a city, a people, a material or an abstract noun and you get an adjective meaning “belonging to that, coming from that, made of that”: مِصْر → مِصْرِيٌّ، ذَهَبٌ → ذَهَبِيٌّ. Arabic grammar calls the ending النِّسْبَة, “the attribution”.

Two facts carry the whole lesson. First, the ya is doubled - the shadda is part of the word, and the case ending still sits on top of it: مِصْرِيٌّ، مِصْرِيًّا، مِصْرِيٍّ. Second, a nisba is an entirely ordinary adjective once it is built, so everything from lesson 8 applies unchanged: ة for a woman (مِصْرِيَّةٌ), الـ when the noun it describes is definite, and the same case as its noun. This one suffix is the fastest vocabulary multiplier in Modern Standard Arabic - a great many of the adjectives in a newspaper sentence are nisbas.

The rule

1. One suffix, two forms. The masculine is ـِيٌّ and the feminine is ـِيَّةٌ. The consonant before the suffix takes a kasra, and the ya carries a shadda:

• مِصْر → مِصْرِيٌّ (an Egyptian man, Egyptian) - مِصْرِيَّةٌ (an Egyptian woman)
• لُبْنان → لُبْنانِيٌّ - لُبْنانِيَّةٌ

2. The shadda is the word. ـِيّ is not a long vowel; it is a kasra followed by two ya’s. You can hear it: مِصْرِيٌّ has a held, doubled consonant that a plain final ي does not. In ordinary unvocalized print (مصري) nothing shows, which is exactly why beginners stop pronouncing it - and a nisba said without the doubling sounds wrong to every Arabic ear. Write the shadda in this lesson and say it out loud until your mouth remembers.

3. It still takes a case ending. The nisba declines like any triptote noun or adjective. The ending goes after the shadda, and the indefinite accusative gets its usual alif seat:

• مَرْفوع: هُوَ مِصْرِيٌّ. / الطّالِبُ المِصْرِيُّ
• مَنْصوب: رَأَيْتُ طالِبًا مِصْرِيًّا. / رَأَيْتُ الطّالِبَ المِصْرِيَّ.
• مَجْرور: تَكَلَّمْتُ مَعَ طالِبٍ مِصْرِيٍّ. / مَعَ الطّالِبِ المِصْرِيِّ

4. Building it, base by base. Four situations cover almost everything you will meet:

• Just add it. A base ending in a consonant takes the suffix straight: لُبْنان → لُبْنانِيٌّ، العِراق → عِراقِيٌّ، بَغْداد → بَغْدادِيٌّ.
• Drop a final ة. The tā’ marbūṭa always disappears first: مَكَّة → مَكِّيٌّ، القاهِرَة → قاهِرِيٌّ، فِضَّة → فِضِّيٌّ.
• Drop the final ا of a foreign name. Names borrowed with ـا or ـيا cut back to the last real consonant: فَرَنْسا → فَرَنْسِيٌّ، أَمْريكا → أَمْريكِيٌّ، سُورِيا → سُورِيٌّ، أَلْمانِيا → أَلْمانِيٌّ، إيطالِيا → إيطالِيٌّ.
• Drop the الـ of a country name. When the name carries an article, the article is not part of the nisba: اليابان → يابانِيٌّ، الصّين → صينِيٌّ، المَغْرِب → مَغْرِبِيٌّ، السّودان → سُودانِيٌّ، الكُوَيْت → كُوَيْتِيٌّ.

The article comes back later, for a different reason - when the whole phrase is definite: الطّالِبُ اليابانِيُّ, “the Japanese student”. That الـ is agreement with طالِب (lesson 8), not a leftover from اليابان.

5. Irregulars: a short list to memorise. A handful of very common bases change shape, and several of them grow a و before the suffix. There is a historical reason (a weak final letter, or a shortened stem), but at this stage they are simply items to learn:

• مَدينَة → مَدَنِيٌّ (urban, civil) - the stem itself shrinks
• سَنَة → سَنَوِيٌّ (annual), لُغَة → لُغَوِيٌّ (linguistic), يَد → يَدَوِيٌّ (manual)
• أَخ → أَخَوِيٌّ (brotherly), أَب → أَبَوِيٌّ (paternal), سَماء → سَماوِيٌّ (heavenly)

When you are not sure, look the nisba up rather than inventing one. A dictionary lists it as its own entry.

6. Materials and colours. The same suffix on a substance gives “made of it”, and often “the colour of it” as well:

خَشَبٌ → خَشَبِيٌّ (wooden), زُجاجٌ → زُجاجِيٌّ (glass), قُطْنٌ → قُطْنِيٌّ (cotton), ذَهَبٌ → ذَهَبِيٌّ (gold, golden), فِضَّةٌ → فِضِّيٌّ (silver).

Arabic keeps the older phrasing too - بابٌ مِنْ خَشَبٍ, “a door of wood” - and both are current. What you may not do is mix them: مِنْ takes the plain noun, never the nisba.

7. Far beyond nationalities. Any noun with a field of meaning can produce one, and MSA leans on this constantly: عِلْمٌ → عِلْمِيٌّ (scientific), سِياسَةٌ → سِياسِيٌّ (political), اِقْتِصادٌ → اِقْتِصادِيٌّ (economic), تاريخٌ → تاريخِيٌّ (historical), ثَقافَةٌ → ثَقافِيٌّ (cultural), طَبيعَةٌ → طَبيعِيٌّ (natural), قانونٌ → قانونِيٌّ (legal), رَسْمٌ → رَسْمِيٌّ (official).

Build these from the singular: قَوانينُ is the plural of قانونٌ, and the adjective is قانونِيٌّ, not anything built on the plural. A handful of fixed words do sit on a plural (أَخْلاقٌ → أَخْلاقِيٌّ, “ethical”), but those are vocabulary, not a licence to make your own.

8. It behaves like any other adjective. Nothing about agreement is special. The nisba follows its noun and copies gender, number, definiteness and case:

• الطّالِبُ المِصْرِيُّ - المِصْرِيَّةُ is what you write for a woman
• سِفارَةٌ أَلْمانِيَّةٌ - both indefinite
• في الشَّرِكَةِ الفَرَنْسِيَّةِ - both definite and مَجْرور

9. It is also a noun. مِصْرِيٌّ on its own means “an Egyptian”, exactly as in English. And the feminine nisba, made definite, is how Arabic names a language: العَرَبِيَّةُ، الفَرَنْسِيَّةُ، اليابانِيَّةُ - short for اللُّغَةُ العَرَبِيَّةُ and so on. Both halves of that phrase are feminine, which is why *اللُّغَةُ العَرَبِيُّ is impossible.

10. Plurals. For people, the ordinary sound plurals of lesson 9 do the work. The ya keeps its shadda and takes the vowel that the ending requires:

• masculine: مِصْرِيُّونَ (مَرْفوع) / مِصْرِيِّينَ (مَنْصوب and مَجْرور)
• feminine: مِصْرِيَّاتٌ / مِصْرِيَّاتٍ

A few very common nationality words are normally pluralised with a broken plural instead of ـُونَ, and these are worth memorising as vocabulary: عَرَبِيٌّ → عَرَبٌ، أَلْمانِيٌّ → أَلْمانٌ، رُوسِيٌّ → رُوسٌ، تُرْكِيٌّ → أَتْراكٌ، كُرْدِيٌّ → أَكْرادٌ (the regular تُرْكِيُّونَ، رُوسِيُّونَ exist too). They are plurals of people, so what follows them is plural too: العَرَبُ الكِرامُ، رَأَيْتُ الأَلْمانَ.

11. Non-human plurals: back to the feminine singular. The rule of lesson 11 outranks everything here. If the noun is a plural of things, its nisba stays feminine singular, however many things there are:

• كُتُبٌ عَرَبِيَّةٌ - Arabic books
• السَّيّاراتُ اليابانِيَّةُ - the Japanese cars
• الدُّوَلُ العَرَبِيَّةُ - the Arab states

The plural مِصْرِيُّونَ is only ever for people.

12. The nisba against the إِضافَة. Lesson 20 gave you one way to link two nouns: سِفارَةُ فَرَنْسا, “the embassy of France”. The nisba gives another: السِّفارَةُ الفَرَنْسِيَّةُ, “the French embassy”. Both are correct Arabic. The difference is that an إِضافَة points at one specific owner, while the nisba describes a kind - and only the nisba can be made indefinite (سِفارَةٌ فَرَنْسِيَّةٌ) or carry الـ of its own.

13. Recognition only. The feminine ending ـِيَّة also builds abstract nouns from the same bases: الحُرِّيَّةُ (freedom), الجِنْسِيَّةُ (nationality), الإِنْسانِيَّةُ (humanity), المَسْؤُولِيَّةُ (responsibility). Read them as words for now; the machinery is the same suffix.

Two neighbouring topics are not here. “More Egyptian than” and “the most famous” use a different word shape altogether (lesson 28), and the “little / dear” endings of التَّصْغير are lesson 57. Note also that many place names - مِصْرُ، لُبْنانُ، بَغْدادُ - take no tanwīn themselves (lesson 41), while their nisbas are perfectly ordinary words that do: مِصْرِيٌّ.

Forms & patterns

Formation by base type