Verbs in the Classroomالأفعال في حُجْرَةِ الدِّرَاسَةِ

This concept is basically the action or word itself, without any tense involved. It literally represents the base idea of an action before it is placed into a tense or attached to a person.

From this action/root idea, different verb forms can then be built based on the tenses

For example:

These two words are currently, representing the action itself, in Arabic, this is known as a Masdar. For example “Writing is Fun”, here “Writing” is a noun, as you haven’t attached this noun to someone doing it, only then it would become a verb (Fi’l), which is studied under the tenses

The difference between the Maṣdar and the Fiʿl (verb) in these tenses is that the Maṣdar represents the action on its own, without being attached to a person or time. The Fiʿl, however, takes that same action and attributes it to someone and a tense. So instead of simply “writing”, it becomes “he wrote”, “he writes”, or “write!”.

There are three tenses in Arabic:

This is similar in number to english, because we know that In English, verbs are also divided into 3 main tenses with even around 4 subcategories each making it a total of 12 tenses

The main difference between the English tenses and Arabic tenses is that, English looks at the “time of that action compared to the current time”. In other words, If the action is complete and not currently happening, it is Past

If it is currently happening it is Present

If it is has not happened, but it will happen later on, then it is Future

If you look carefully, you will notice that these same actions, instead of categorising them based on “current time”, we can also categorise them based on whether they are completed or not

For example, the Past is something that has already happened, so this is complete. The Present is something that is currently happening, however it has still not bene completed, and if it was completed it would have been past by definition. As the present is still happening, it is therefore incomplete. Lastly the Future tense, it has not happened already, nor is it happening right now, rather it is going to happen, so that is also incomplete

So as you can see, the same three english tenses of Past, Present, Future can also be categorised into Completed Tenses and Incomplete Tenses

Now, this is exactly what Arabic is, it has these three tenses, but categorised from a different angle, Completed (Paste Tense) and Incomplete Tenses (The Present/Future Tense):

However, Arabic introduces a 3rd “tense” to its set of two, and this is known as the Command. So from an english perspective it would be the fourth one of the english three tenses:

From the actual Arabic categorisation it would be the third of three categories (As the Present and Future come under one category):

The command form is less of a “tense”; rather, it is a verb “form” or “mood” (the way a verb is used to express a purpose or function) used to give commands, instructions, or requests.

The rules, on making verbs within these tenses are discussed later in section “11.1 Formulation Verbs”, for now you should continue reading in order