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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 the last lesson, we learned how to say laysa ladayya or “I don’t have” and lastu ǧāhiz or “I am not ready” without using a verb.
In this lesson, we’ll start to learn about Arabic adjectives and how to use them properly.
You will see that for adjectives, things in Arabic are not as easy as in English.
The basic rule in order to use adjectives correctly is that in Arabic, adjectives always have to agree with the word that they are qualifying.
Let’s start with a concrete example: hāḏā ṣabiyyun ǧamīlun. “This is a handsome boy.”
[slowly] hāḏā ṣabiyyun ǧamīlun
Let’s see the same sentence with a feminine subject. It becomes – ”This is a pretty girl”, "hāḏihi fatātun ǧamīlatun”
[slowly]hāḏihi fatātun ǧamīlatun
Here the word fatātun is a feminine singular word, so the adjective “pretty” is also in the feminine singular form.
We have to replace -un with -atun at the end of the adjective to make it feminine.
Here are a few more examples (pronounced without the final accents) to show the difference between the masculine and feminine forms.
laṭīf is the masculine for "nice", "kind", whereas laṭīfah is the feminine.
Musallī is the masculine for ”fun", whereas Musalliyah is the feminine.
sāḫin is the masculine for "hot", whereas sāḫinah is the feminine.
sarīʿ is the masculine for "fast", whereas sarīʿah is the feminine.
So in order to change the masculine adjective to a feminine adjective, just add -ah at the end!
Now let’s find out how to turn an adjective from singular to plural, it isn’t a very easy task, but with practice you’ll get there!
Basically the rule is to keep the feminine adjective as it is to make it plural in some cases.
In other cases (without the final accent), the adjectives that end with “ah” will end with “āt”
But as is often the case in Arabic, there are exceptions.
The difficulty is that sometimes a word that is masculine in the singular will become feminine in the plural, so the adjective in plural will have to be changed accordingly.
For example, hāḏihi fatātun ǧamīlatun means "This is a pretty girl", so if you turn it to plural it becomes haʾulāʾi fatayātun ǧamīlātun, which is "These are pretty girls”. As you can see,hāḏihi, fatātun and ǧamīlatun are turned into the plural.
If the plural of a feminine or masculine word ends with ātun (or ātin) depending on the accent, the adjective will end with “ātun”, and the plural form of hāḏihi is haʾulāʾi.
Let’s practice with a word that is masculine when it is in the singular form and becomes feminine in the plural. Let’s see some examples:
If you want to say "This house is big" you will say hāḏā al-baytu kabīrun, as bayt is masculine.
But if you want to say "These houses are big" you will say hāḏihi al-buyūtu kabīratun , you transformed the masculine al-baytu to the feminine al-buyūtu and the adjectives were changed accordingly.
Now let’s see how to transform masculine singular adjectives to the masculine plural.
al-sāriqu sarīʿun
al-sāriqūn sarīʿūn
Now it’s time for Carole’s Tips.
In order to say “the big house” instead of “the house is big” we need to add “al-” or “the” before the adjective too to make it “defined” as we say in Arabic.
So instead of “the house is big” or al-baytu kabīrun we say al-baytu al-kabīru or “the big house”.
To say “a big house”, we remove both “al-”s to have baytun kabīrun. The final accent “un” means the same as the English “a” or “an”.
In this lesson, we learned how to properly use adjectives in Arabic and how to agree them correctly with nouns.
Next time we’ll learn the basic uses of verb ḏahaba, which is "to go," so that you will be able to say sentences like "I’m going to school."
I’ll be waiting for you in the next Al-ʿarabiyyah fi ṯalāṯi daqāʾiq!
ʾilā al-liqāʾi qarīban!

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