Year 1 Review: Perfect and Imperfect Tense

Hello and salaam,

In last week's review, I went over the magical verbless sentence, Arabic's way of getting around the words "is," "am," and "are." For this week's review, I'd like to go over the other kind of sentence in Arabic, the verbal sentence. I don't want to be confusing at all: this is literally just a sentence with a verb, and a verb is just any action word (eat, drink, cook), as you might have learned in an English class.

Tense is just a grammar word for time, and Arabic has two of them: the perfect tense and the imperfect tense. "Perfect" means a verb already happened, whether it was terrible (I broke my arm) or terrific (I won Best New Reggae Artist), whereas "imperfect" means one of five things: either the verb didn't happen (I wasn't sad), the verb is happening (I love coffee), the verb is not happening (I do not eat chameleon meat), will happen (I will see you later), or won't happen (I will not forget this review material). Since imperfect verbs have five times as many uses, you'll see them more often. Then again, to tell a story about something in the past, you'll need the perfect tense.

Most Arabic verbs are short, three-letter combinations like أكل (a-ka-la, eat) or شرب (sha-ri-ba, drink) or طبخ (Ta-ba-kha, cook). Some are longer and some are shorter; some are hollow, others defective, and some are other species of wackadoode. But the basic three-letter pattern is the one to study, and the model verb for that pattern is فعل (fa-3a-la), meaning "do." You can conjugate فعل in the perfect tense (ie. say who did and when) using suffixes stuck on the end of it. See this chart:

فعلنا	نَحْنُ	فعلتُ	أنا
فعلتم	أنتُم	فعلتَ	أنتَ
فعلتنّ	أنتن	فعلتِ	أنتِ
فعلوا	هُم	فعل	هوَ
فعلن	هنّ	فعلتْ	هيَ

The blue pronouns on the right are, top to bottom: I, you masculine, you feminine, he, and she. Remember that there is strictly no "it" in Arabic, so know the gender of the thing you're talking about. Also remember that non-human pronouns are conjugated for "she" in Arabic. The human plurals on the left are, top to bottom: we, y'all masculine, y'all feminine, they masculine, and they feminine. The "y'all feminine" and "they feminine" conjugations are only used with groups of exclusively women/girls--once there is one man/boy in the group, you use the masculine/mixed conjugation. Note that in the they masculine conjugation, there is an alif at the end that is not pronounced. Here are some examples:

قدمت "qadamtu" I came

سقط "saqaTa" he/it fell

شربنا "sharibna" we drank

منعوا "mana3uu" they forbade

On the other hand, imperfect verbs have prefixes instead of suffixes, little letter stuck on the beginning of the verb. The imperfect conjugations are here:

نفعل	نَحْنُ	أفعل	أنا
تفعلون	أنتُم	تفعل	أنتَ
تفعلن	أنتن	تفعلين	أنتِ
يفعلون	هُم	يفعل	هوَ
يفعلن	هنّ	تفعل	هيَ

The prefix letter to all of these conjugations, whether it's alif or ta or ya or nuun, is pronounced either as an "a" sound or an "u" sound, depending on the verb. So whereas "we love" is nu-Hibb, "we cook" is na-Tbakh, and while there is a logic to these changes, it's something we'll have to cover later on. 

You can add the letter سـ (pronounced "sa") to the beginning of any imperfect verb to get the future conjugation, or any of the following negations: لم ("lem," meaning "didn't"), لا ("la," meaning "doesn't" or "don't"), or لن ("len," meaning "won't"). Note that the conjugations following لم lose their nuun at the end. Look at these examples:

لا يلعبون "la yal3abuuna" They are not playing

لم يقرأوا "lem yaqra'uu" They did not read

سأدرس "sa'adrus" I will study

لن تأكلون "len ta'kuluuna" Y'all will not eat

I hope this review is helpful for you. Next week we will take a look at hollow verbs and the passive voice to round out this year. Shukran for reading!