Word Structure

words structure or Parts of speech أقسام الكلام in Arabic are divided into three types of words: verbs, nouns, and particles 

Nouns الأسماء

A noun is a person, place, thing, or idea. It’s the same concept in English and Arabic. But, unlike English, a noun has a lot more attached grammar in Arabic.

Nouns in the Arabic language can be classified into 

gender, plurality, derivation, definiteness

 Verbs الأفعال

A verb is a word (part of speech) that describes an action (to bring يحضر , To read يقرأ,  to learn يتعلم),

an occurrence (To happen يحدث, to become يصبح), or a state of being (to be يكون , to stay يبقى). 

The usual and the basic form of the verbs are the infinitives.

In Arabic, They are more classified with morphology, however, verbs are inflected (modified in form) to encode tense, aspect, mood, and voice. For example: فتح /fataha/ Meaning: opened

There are three tenses in Arabic: the past tense (اَلْمَاضِي al-māḍī), the present tense (اَلْمُضَارِع al-muḍāriʿ) and the future tense. The future tense in Classical Arabic is formed by adding either the prefix ‏سَـ‎ sa- or the separate word ‏سَوْفَ‎ sawfa onto the beginning of the present tense verb, e.g. سَيَكْتُبُ sa-yaktubu or سَوْفَ يَكْتُبُ sawfa yaktubu ‘he will write’.

Particles الحروف والأدوات

Now we come to the third and final type of Arabic word: the حرف.

Particles can be considered as assistants and are all other words that are not the above-mentioned parts. Some semantic functions cannot be fulfilled unless these particles are there to support them.

To make it clearer they Unlike the اسم and the فعل , a حرف comes to give meaning in the context of some other word(s).  if I say “قط”, you hear it and you just know that I mean “a cat”.  I don’t need to add anything else for you to understand the meaning.

They don’t have a meaning by themselves, they have to be attached to a noun or a verb. Often, particles only make sense in a sentence.

for example 

 If I said  دعوتهُ على العشاءِ (“I invited him for dinner”), you’d know that على means “for”.  If I said المفاتيح على المائدة (“The keys are on the table”), you’d know that على means “on”.  In either case, you only know what على means because of the other words I used it with.

particles in total aren’t a lot, they are Less than 80 in the entire language divided into 15 categories.

Do you want to learn Arabic grammar for free?