Arabic verbs is based on only three letters fa ain lam فَعَلَ. The unique thing is Arabic verb it is original form is masculine and past tense. For example he sat which is Ja la sa, I was told that 95 percent of Arabic verbs have the same pattern and what pattern is that.
Alright Fa a’ la فَعَلَ notice all the letters have fataah as vowel sound. Virtually all Arabic verbs have only three letters, and the first and last letter is always and always fataah.
Some example are ka ta ba he wrote كَتَبَ, da kha la which means he enter دَخَلَ or sa ja da which means he prostrated سَجَدَ. If you notice that all of them have sound aaa in the beginning and in the end of the syllable. This is the wonder of Arabic, 95 percent of its verb has only 3 syllable and the first and last syllable has the same vowel sound.
One more thing is that the pronoun he in Arabic is huwa but when it come to verbs it disappear, so instead of saying huwa sajada هُوَ سَجَدَ (he prostrated) you just say sajada. The verb in its original form is understood to be male and singular.
The fun begins when the verb changes is form and sound by adding prefixes and suffixes to represent either plural ,singular, first person , second person, third person plural.
There are for letters that will change a verb that is alif, nun, ya, and ta but in this article we only deal with alif nun and ya.
Lets deal with Alif ا ن first, alif is added at the beginning of the word to signify that the speaker is talking about himself.
By adding alif the verb is change from its original form which is past tense and to present tense. For example if your teacher call you and ask you what you are doing. If you writing, so the verb is kataba كَتَبَ which means he wrote. He is third person and wrote is past tense.
To change it into first person and present tense, you simply ad an alif ا at the beginning of kataba, when you do this two things happen. You ad Alif which is sounds aa to kataba. It becomes ak tu bu اَكْتُبُ. Which means I am writing.
That’s it you just ad an alif ا at the front change the fataah on the vowel sound on the first letter of the verb into sukun ْ and change the second and third vowel sound into dumma which is the sound uuu. So from kataba it becomes aktubu. The same rules apply when the speaker is male and female.
What about if the speaker is more than one person, like instead of I am writing you want to say we are writing. You just change the letter alif into nun. So the kataba becomes nak tubu which means we are writing.
By adding a ي infront of a verb you will be change the time of the verb. As we know that Arabic verbs in its original form is singular masculine (he) and referring to and action done in the past.
This is for third person singular and present tense.