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Lesson Transcript

Marḥaban ǧamīʿan, ʾanā Carole! Hi everybody! I’m Carole.
Welcome to ArabicPod101.com’s Al-ʿarabiyyah fi ṯalāṯi daqāʾiq. The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Arabic.
In our previous lessons, we learned how to talk about age, location and possession without using a verb. In this lesson, we’re going to learn how to use negative forms in order to say "I'm not" and "I don't have."
So let's take an example. Imagine you are about to go to a party with an Arabic-speaking friend. You ask him if he’s ready, and he answers Lā, lastu jāhiz. Then, you ask him if he has a car to use to go to the party and he says Lā, laysa ladayya sayyarah.
Let’s look at these two negative sentences:
Lā, lastu jāhiz
Lā, laysa ladayya sayyarah.
[slowly] Lā, lastu jāhiz/Lā, laysa ladayya sayyarah.
In each sentence, you have two little words, lastu and laysa. These are the 1st and 3rd person forms of the word laysa used to express the negative in Arabic.
So let's have a look at how to switch from affirmative to negative.
First, we already learned that affirmative sentences with the meaning of “to be” do not actually take a verb.
So to say “I am ready” we say “ʾanā jāhiz”, and for a woman the adjective jāhiz or “ready” has to be changed according to the gender, to become “ʾanā jāhizah”.
The word laysa comes to negate a sentence, and its form changes according to the person. If your friend were ready, he would say anā jāhiz, “I am ready.” But he actually said anā lastu jāhiz. So basically, you just have to put the word laysa in the corresponding form before the adjective.
Now let's look at an example with ladā meaning "to have":
(ʾanā) ladayya sayyarah is ”I have a car”, and "I don't have a car" is (ʾanā) laysa ladayya sayyarah.
You can replace sayyarah with any other noun since the sentence means “I don’t have...”
Since there’s no adjective in the sentence, there’s no need to change any word according to gender.
So now, how would you say "I don't like this restaurant?" For reference, “I like this restaurant.” is “ʾanā ʾuḥibbu hāḏā al-maṭʿam”
Just as we learned in the last lesson, to negate the sentence ʾanā ʾamluku sayyārah we add lā before the verb ʾamluku so the sentence becomes ʾanā lā ʾamluku sayyārah.
In the sentence ʾanā ʾuḥibbu hāḏā al-maṭʿam, the verb is ʾuḥibbu “to like” . So again, to make a negative sentence, we add lā before the verb ʾuḥibbu, so the sentence becomes:
ʾanā lā ʾuḥibbu hāḏā al-maṭʿam.
[slowly] ʾanā lā ʾuḥibbu hāḏā al-maṭʿam.
Easy, don't you think? So now you can turn many sentences into the negative form just by adding the words you learned.
Now it’s time for Carole’s tips.
If you want to answer negatively with a verb in the sentence use lā before the verb, and if it is a sentence without a verb you can use the convenient form of laysa.
Get ready for the next lesson, because we are going to study a really important part of the Arabic language – using adjectives.
I’ll be waiting for you in the next Al-ʿarabiyyah fi ṯalāṯi daqāʾiq.
ʾilā al-liqāʾi qarīban!
See you soon!

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