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12. Swedish women
Click on the ear to play sound.
mundhu 'an kuntu murāhiqan 'ahbabtu 'as-sayyidāta s-suwīdiyyāt
Ever since I was a teenager, I have loved Swedish women.
wa-shāhadtu 'aflāman cadīda bihā sayyidāt suwīdiyyāt shaqrāwât jamīlāt
I have seen many films with beautiful blonde Swedish women.
wa-mā 'uhibbu 'akthar huwa 'ash-shacri l-'ashqar maca l-hawājibi s-sawda'.
What I like most is the blonde hair with the dark eyebrows.
wa-l-mar'ātu s-suwīdiyya allati 'uhibbuhā 'akthar hiyya brīt 'aklānd
The Swedish woman I love most is Britt Ekland.
wa-lakinni 'azunn 'innahā kabīratu s-sinn 'al-'an
But I think she is old now.
hādha shay'un jayyid bi-tilka l-aflām, 'as-sayyidātu s-suwīdiyyātu sh-shaqrāwāt yabqayna shabab lil-'abad
That is good about films, blonde Swedish women stay young forever.
'anā 'aydan 'uhibb 'as-sayyidāta l-misriyyāt, khassatan hawājibahunna s-sawdā'.
I like Egyptian women too, especially their dark eyebrows.
Word list for this lesson >>
Grammar: Declension of nouns and declining of verbs
To many people's surprise, Arabic grammar in repspect of syntax, declension and declining is far less uncomplicated than what is found in most Western languages. Vocabulary is, however a challenge, due to its richness.
There are three cases to Arabic: Nominative, Accusative, and Genitive. These are controlled by the analythical structure of a sentence, certain prepositions, and use of controller words. These rules are unproblematic, but will be covered better with books for advanced studies. As for now: When listening to the sound clips here, you might have noticed that endings are often put to a noun or adjective, but that this is not written. What you here see, is the implementation of cases.
Nominative: -u and -un.
Accusative: -a and -an.
Genitive: -i and -in.
Declining of verbs is a shock to most. There are only 2 tenses. Yes, it is true! Perfect, for actions already completed, and Imperfect, for actions incompleted. There are some derivatives of these two, but for all three levels of BABEL:arabic, learning 2 tenses is practically the only main effort imposed upon you.
The bad thing is that all verbs are declined differently according to sex and numbers, leaving you with 13 forms. These, however, are strictly controlled by the rules.
As for an example of the use of Perfect and Imperfect:
he wrote: kataba
she wrote: katabat
he writes: yaktaba
she writes: taktaba
There are problems awaiting you with verbs, more than for the declension, (well covered in books for advanced studies), we will provide you with a handful of hints on how to reduce the problems effectively, yet grammatically correctly.
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