Egyptian Verbs

If you're trying to learn Egyptian Verbs you will find some useful resources including a course about Verbs in the present past and future tense... to help you with your Egyptian Arabic grammar. Try to concentrate on the lesson and notice the pattern that occurs each time the word changes its place. Also don't forget to check the rest of our other lessons listed on Learn Egyptian. Enjoy the rest of the lesson!

Egyptian Verbs

Learning the Egyptian Verbs is very important because its structure is used in every day conversation. The more you master it the more you get closer to mastering the Egyptian language. But first we need to know what the role of Verbs is in the structure of the grammar in Egyptian.

Egyptian verbs are words that convey action (bring, read, walk, run), or a state of being (exist, stand). In most languages a verb may agree with the person, gender, and/or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object.

Egyptian to has only 2 times, the perfect and the imperfect, but there is a difference, in the west we look at the points in time in where a action takes place, the Arabs however look at the aspect of a verb meaning they ask is the action finished or not (They don’t ask themselves when did it finish or not). Of course a finished action corresponds with the past as does a unfinished action with the present, but not necessarily so. Here are some examples:

Egyptian verb conjugation is a bit complex, although very regular the so called semivowels alif, waw and ya and the glottal stop hamza cause irregularity in Egyptian verb conjugation. The simplest Egyptian verb excist out of three consonants like كتب KaTaBa meaning he wrote or he has written. The past tense is conjugated by suffixes, the present tense by prefixes. The Arabs use the verb fa3ala (to do) to represent all possible forms a verb may have. The problem lies in the fact that any of those root consonants might be an hamza, the glottal stop or an alif, a waw or a ya, the so called semi-consonants. They might be retained or disappear according to certain rules.

Egyptian verbs have ten (even more) forms. To give you an example,third rule علَم allama means to know, The second form علّم allama with the second consonant doubled means to let know meaning to teach, the fifth form تعلّم ta3allama means to let your self know meaning to study! The tenth form istaf3ala means in general to think to act out an action described by the verb, so istahhasana to think to be beatifull from hhasana to be beautiful. I once made a joke during my Egyptian studies. In Holland we call a street car (an electric street car) a tram. This exactly fits the Egyptian verb paradigm. Back in those days I sometimes sat in the tram without a ticket which we Dutch call zwart rijden (driving black). So I said if tram would be an Egyptian verb ترم TRM the zwart rijde would be translated as IstTarama استرّم thinking to ride on a tram (with a ticket).

Notice the structure of the Verbs in Egyptian.

List of Verbs in Egyptian

Below is a list of the conjugated Verbs in the present past and future in Egyptian placed in a table. Memorizing this table will help you add very useful and important words to your Egyptian vocabulary.

Verbs in the present past and future tense have a very important role in Egyptian. Once you're done with Egyptian Verbs, you might want to check the rest of our Egyptian lessons here: Learn Egyptian. Don't forget to bookmark this page.

The links above are only a small sample of our lessons, please open the left side menu to see all links.