This lesson will help you understand the Arabic verbs especially past tense and future tense, and enables you to use real examples shown below. If you have any question let us know by clicking on the “Contact us” button, this lesson is very important since it covers a very widely used element in Arabic which is the past and future tense.

The past Tense in Arabic:

To form the past tense in Arabic you need to extract the stem from the verb in the infinitive first, for example:

To write = kataba è stem is ktb, now let’s look at the table below to see how this verb is conjugated in this tense:

This is very easy and simple! You can put almost all trilateral Arabic verbs in this table. First take the verb you want to conjugate, extract all its 3 consonants, put them in place of the 3 red consonant on the table above. As you may have noticed, look at how the three consonants are spread in the word katabtu, consonant+ vowel+ consonant+ vowel+ consonant…

I will make the same note I made before in the present tense, you will have to change the vowel in the green font into “i”, the only difference this time is that you won’t have to do it that often as the case with the present tense, because the “a” is more used. Do you remember the two verbs (to advise = nasaha, and to hit = daraba) that we conjugated differently in the present tense, in the past tense they can be conjugated the same way as rasama & kataba , like I said before many verbs will follow the general rules of the table above when it comes to the past tense unlike the present tense.

To conjugate your own trilateral verb into the past tense go to the table and have your verb stem ready (don’t tell me you forgot how to make a stem from a trilateral verb)

It should contain three consonant and no vowels, if you want to conjugate it in the paste tense then replace the first consonant on the table above in red “k” with the first consonant of the stem you have of your own verb, then replace “t” with the second consonant you have, finally replace “b” with the last consonant you have, and that’s it!

Example: I wrote = katabtu , if you want to use “I went” (1 step is to find the verb to go in the Arabic infinitive: the verb is dahaba = to go, 2: the stem is dhb, 3: omit the (k, t, b) stem in the table above and put yours, you will easily get è dahabtu!!)

Note:  in case you’re confused whether to replace the “a” in the green font with “i” or not, I would just tell you that if you’re a beginner just leave the “a”, because “a” is the most common, but I would also suggest to read more about the forms that most of verbs take so that you will easily decide whether to put “a” or “i” when conjugating verbs into the past tense in Arabic.

Future Tense in Arabic:

To form the Arabic future tense simply use: sa or sawfa + (the verb in present tense).

Examples: sa aktubu (I will write), sa adhabu (I will go), or if you want to use sawfa: sawfa aktubu (I will go), sawfa adhabu (I will go). Isn’t that a piece of cake!

There is no difference between sa and sawfa, to make it easy you can choose to use sa most of the time so that you won’t get confused.

I hope you benefited from this lesson (the Arabic past and future tense), please check our other lessons to take advantage of the other useful information they may contain.