9 Basic Arabic Grammar Rules For Beginners To Get To Grips With Arabic

When I first started learning Arabic, friends and family would ask me if it was hard. Many of them assumed that it was tough because of its script.

While learning a new script can be difficult, it's the grammar that makes Arabic tricky to master because Arabic and English grammar are pretty different.

Fortunately though, Arabic grammar is quite consistent and systematic. So you won’t spend a huge amount of time learning exceptions.

To get you started, here are nine of the main rules of Arabic grammar. For each one, I’ll break down the grammar rule and give you some tips to master them.

1. Every Arabic Dialect Has Its Own Grammar Features

Before jumping into the Arabic grammar rules themselves, I do think it’s important to cover this point. 

Unlike many other languages, Arabic dialects can differ to the point that many native Arabic speakers from one country can’t understand other dialects from other countries. 

For the most part, the fundamental grammar rules in Arabic are fairly constant across all the dialects. Still, there are some significant differences. 

This means that even if you learn one dialect of Arabic, there’s a good chance you'll have to relearn some grammar rules in other Arabic dialects. 

For example, all verb conjugations for the present tense in the Levantine Arabic start with a b- / ب- prefix. This doesn’t come up in other dialects like the Egyptian dialect.

It’s because of this that I won’t get into all the grammar features for each of the dialects. Instead I’ll focus on some of the main Arabic grammar features in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which is the standard written form of Arabic. 

The good news though is that the grammar for Arabic dialects is generally a lot more simple than MSA. So it’s not difficult to pick up on the grammar of any of the dialects after developing a solid foundation in MSA. 

2. All Arabic Nouns Are Gendered

As an English speaker, I sometimes feel lucky that nouns in English aren’t gendered. But if you do grow up speaking a language with gendered words, then it probably feels like second nature. 

This must be the case for most Arabic speakers, because all Arabic nouns are either masculine or feminine. 

Fortunately, unlike some languages, it’s pretty simple to tell whether a word is masculine or feminine in Arabic. That’s because words that are feminine typically end with a letter in the alphabet that we call the tarmabuuta / ة, while masculine words typically do not. 

When speaking, it’s often pretty easy to tell which nouns are masculine or feminine. That’s because the tarmabuuta / ة is typically sounded as the “a” sound in English. Here are a few examples of masculine and feminine nouns in Arabic: 

That said, there are some nouns that are feminine that don’t have a tarmabuuta / ة at the end. Most of them are easy to remember because you can assume from the translation of the noun itself that the word might be feminine. 

For example, you can safely guess that the words bint / بنت (girl) or um / أم (mother) are feminine because of the meaning. 

There are also a few other categories of nouns where you can safely assume that they’re feminine, even if they don’t have a tarmabuuta / ة at the end.

For instance, city and country names (Syria, France, Beirut, etc.) are all treated as feminine nouns even when they don’t have a tarmabuuta / ة at the end.

Considering all of this and because so much of Arabic grammar builds on a strong foundation of knowing the gender of different nouns, I’d recommend noting down whether a word is masculine or feminine when learning new words. 

3. Nouns Are Conjugated By Number (Singular, Dual & Plural)

In many languages, one of the first things you’ll want to learn is how to make words plural. In English, for example, you can make words plural by adding an “s” at the end of the word. 

• Word → Words
• Cat → Cats
• Baby → Babies

While this is relatively straightforward in English, making nouns plural in Arabic comes with a few more rules depending on the type of noun in question.  

For starters, if the noun is for a person, you add the suffix -uun / -ون at the end of the word for masculine nouns or the suffix -aat / -ات if the word is feminine. 

Take for example the word “parent” in Arabic, which can either be masculine or feminine depending on the gender of the subject (walid / والد OR walida / والدة). To make these words plural, you add different suffixes based on whether the word is masculine or feminine: 

• walid / والد → waliduun / والدون 
• walida / والدة →  walidaat / والدات

For nouns that aren’t people, making the noun plural comes down to memorizing a new word that takes on a different pattern of the root letters of the word (I’ll get more into the root and pattern system later in this post). 

Here are a couple of examples: 

• Shajara / شجرة (tree) → Ashjaar / أشجار (trees)
• QiTTa / قطّة (cat) → QiTaT / قطط (cats)
• Suura / صورة (picture) → Suwar / صور (pictures)
• Hadeeqa / حديقة (park) → Hadaa’iq / حدائق (parks) 
• Harb / حرب (war) → Huruub / حروب (wars)

Feeling confused? I wouldn’t worry about it so much. At first, it might be something that you have to wrap your head around – I certainly felt that way when I first started learning this. 

In fact, there are still times I mix up plurals when speaking. Fortunately when this has happened, my conversation partners have been really understanding about it and have pointed it out. And I take a mental note of it to avoid making the same mistake in the future. 

But like I mentioned before, there are certain patterns that come up in the plural forms, so you do start getting used to the patterns of these words. 

If you look to the word Shajara / شجرة (tree) and its plural form Ashjaar / أشجار (trees), for example, it’s pretty similar to the way you make the word baab / باب (door) plural. 

• Shajara / شجرة (tree) → Ashjaar / أشجار (trees)
• baab / باب (door) → Abwaab / أبواب (doors) 

At the end of the day though, there's no logic that would make one noun have a certain pattern. This means that it helps to memorise the plural form of the noun the minute you first learn a new word so that you don’t have to backtrack down the line to relearn the plural form. 

This might mean that if you stumble on a new word when reading a text, you take note of it, and take the time later to look up its plural form.

4. Adjectives Are Conjugated To Gender & More

This is a grammar feature that comes up in lots of languages that have gendered nouns, like Spanish and Greek, so you may already be familiar with it if you know these languages.

Put simply, if you want to describe a noun with an adjective, you need to conjugate the adjective to the gender and other features of the noun, such as plurality and definiteness. 

The other thing to keep in mind in Arabic is that adjectives don’t come before the noun like they would in English, but only after the noun. 

This is a bit different from English, where adjectives don't conjugate, and always comes before the noun. For example: 

• A black (adjective) book (noun)
• The short (adjective) woman (noun)

In Arabic, these would be: 

• Kitaab aswad / كتاب أسود (literally: book black (masculine conjugation) 
• Al-imra’a al-qaSeera / الإمراءة القصيرة (literally: the woman the short (feminie conjugation))

The best way to practice this? When I started learning how to conjugate adjectives, I started by looking around the room I was sitting in and describing the things around me using the vocabulary I knew. 

After all, there’s nothing as effective as real-life context when learning a new language. 

5. The Grammar For Arabic Numbers Can Be Tricky 

Sure, counting from 1 to 10 in Arabic can be simple, but did you know that Arabic numbers have their own grammar system? 

If I had to pick one grammar feature in Arabic as the most difficult, I think the grammar for Arabic numbers would be high on the list. 

This is because the conjugation rules for the numbers 1, 2, 3-10, and 11-99 when counting objects are all unique in their own way. Sometimes, numbers conjugate as adjectives of a noun (numbers 1 and 2, for example), but other times they might act as part of a compound noun. 

I raise this here not to scare you, but to give you full disclosure and to give you a heads up that it’ll go a long way to dedicate some time early on to learning the grammar rules for numbers. 

If you’re feeling stumped by the numbers, then I’d definitely recommend that you check out my post on Arabic numbers for an easy guide. 

And of course, you can always get the hang of numbers over time through immersion, such as through reading short stories! My course Arabic Uncovered helps you do just that if you want to learn through the power of story. 

6. Arabic Verbs Conjugate By Person, Number, Gender & Tense

There’s a lot more to conjugating Arabic verbs than might first meet the eye. 

But the main thing is that Arabic verbs conjugate depending on four different factors: 

• Person, whether that be the first, second, or third persons
• Number, whether the subject is singular, dual (two persons/things), or plural
• Gender, depending on whether the subject is masculine or feminine
• Tense, whether that be the past, present or future tense

Here’s an example of a verb in the present tense that you conjugate based on all of these factors: 

I remember feeling most stumped by the dual form because it was unlike anything I’d encountered in any other language. 

But I was very glad after realizing that the dual form was mostly important for learning MSA, and that it doesn’t feature nearly as much in the Arabic dialects. 

Interested in learning more about Arabic verb conjugation? You can always check out my blog on the basics of Arabic verb conjugation to learn more. 

7. Arabic Sentence Structure Has A Different Word Order

What do I mean by word order in a sentence? This might take you back to your English classes at school, so bear with me. 

The most simple sentences in English start with a subject, then follow with a verb and object. Let’s call this Subject-Verb-Object word order. 

Take, for instance, the sentence, “Sarah eats the apple”. In this sentence, the subject is “Sarah”, the verb is “eats”, and the object is “the apple”.  

In Arabic, instead of following SVO word order, the most simple Arabic sentences in modern texts start with a verb, which is then followed by the subject and object (Verb-Subject-Object). 

So if I take the same sentence “Sarah eats the apple”, this would become: 

• Ta’kul Sarah al-tuffaaH / تأكل سارة التفّاح (literally: “Eats (3rd person feminine conjugation) Sarah the apple”). 

If a sentence includes a pronoun as the subject (for example, “I”, “he”, “you”, or “we”), the sentence might forgo writing out the subject entirely because it’s implied in the verb conjugation

For example: 

• Nashrab al-shaay / نشرب الشاي (We drink tea [literally: Drinks (we) tea])
• Mashuu ila al-madrasa / مشوا الى المدرسة (They walked to school [literally: Walked (they) to school])

In both of these examples, there's no pronoun subject that comes after the verb because it’s clear who the subject is from the verb conjugation. 

8. All Words In Arabic Have Three Root Letters

Now this is one grammar feature in Arabic that I think makes Arabic one of the coolest languages to learn. For the most part, Arabic words are all made up of three root letters, from which new patterns of formulating these root letters create new meanings. 

In fact, if you look to the example of al-kitaaba / الكتابة (to write) from the example in the previous section, I even wrote out the three root letters: kaaf, ta, and ba ( ك ت ب). 

With these root letters, there are a lot of different words that I can make sense of just by understanding the general usages of specific word patterns in Arabic.

Here are some word patterns I can transplant these letters into to make sense of new vocabulary: 

• Fa’3il / فاعِل – this pattern is generally used for the subject or “doer” of the verb. With the root letters kaaf, ta, and ba ( ك ت ب), this word would become Katib / كاتِب, or “writer”
• Maf3uul / مَفعول – this pattern is typically used as the object of a the action implied in the root letters. With the root letters kaaf, ta, and ba ( ك ت ب), this becomes Maktuub / مَكتوب (the thing which is written)
• Maf3al / مَفعَل – this pattern is common for describing the place in which the action implied in the root letters would take place. With the root letters kaaf, ta, and ba ( ك ت ب), this becomes Maktab / مَكتَب , the word in Arabic for “office”
• There are other nouns like kitaab / كتاب (book) that also come from the same root letters

The concept shouldn’t be entirely new because there are examples of word patterns in English too. 

Take the word “work”. When you add the suffix “-er” to the word, you create a new word for occupation or a person doing something. “Bake” and “baker”, “swim” and “swimmer”, and “climb” and “climber” are all examples of this. 

With Arabic though, the root letters and pattern system is even more systematic and regular than a language like English where there are many exceptions to the rule, making it highly unique. 

For instance, there are very few words in Arabic that have four root letters, and when they do, it’s usually because they’re a loan word from another language. 

That said though, this system doesn’t necessarily mean you can create new words or meanings with other word patterns that you’re familiar with. 

I once tried doing this at a souq / سوق (marketplace) in Cairo. It felt as if all the store managers were entertaining my attempts at trying to create new words. 

Still, it can help a lot with reading new texts, and there’s a lot that you can infer just by familiarity with the root letters of a word. 

9. The Arabic Verb System Is Worth Learning In Time

If you thought the root system was unique, then wait until you learn about the Arabic verb system.

Here’s the short version: there are a total of ten verb forms in Arabic, and all Arabic verbs fit into these forms. 

The short version might have sounded a bit confusing, so let me break it down a bit more. I mentioned just before that all Arabic words have three letters that, depending on the pattern of the word, can morph into different but related meanings. 

This same logic applies for verbs as well, and there are a total of ten different verb forms from which all Arabic verbs derive. 

Here’s a table summing up the ten verb forms in Arabic and how they might apply for different verbs: 

ِAmazingly enough, you can take the three roots of any word and replace them with the fa, 3in, and laam (ف ع ل) letters that are in this table. 

The cool thing about Arabic verb forms is that like word patterns that have distinct meanings, each verb form implies certain meanings. So you can make very good guesses of the meanings of different verbs if you don’t know a word but are familiar with the root letters and the verb form.  

Starting from the first form, Form 1 verbs are generally the most basic or simplest form of verbs. Verbs like darasa / درس (to study) or kharaja / خرج (to leave/exit) are examples of these. 

Form 2, on the other hand, implies causation, a more intense version of the Form 1 of the verb, or are used for verbs that require an object. 

For example, if you take the Form 1 verb darasa / درس (to study) and apply it to Form 2, you get darrasa / درّس, which means to make someone study. In other words, darrasa / درّس means “to teach”. 

Another example is the Form 1 verb kasara / كسر (to break), where its Form 2 verb form kassara / كسّر means “to smash”. 

Meanwhile, Form 3 verbs generally suggest that the verb is reflexive, or being done together with someone or something else.

If you take the verb shaahada / شاهد (to watch), for example, the verb implies that you are watching something and something is watching you back, like a TV. 

The list goes on from there. While some of the verb forms have broader meanings, others are used for very specific purposes. Form 9 verbs, for instance, are rarely used. When you do use them, it’s to express that someone or something has become a certain colour. 

Why do I say that the verb forms are worth learning? There are a couple of reasons why. 

First, learning the verb forms will guarantee that you have good Arabic pronunciation. Each of the verb forms come with specific vowels, so you’ll be sure to not mispronounce words. 

Second, the verb forms are incredibly useful for reading all sorts of texts and inferring meanings without looking at a dictionary. You might be able to pick out the general meanings of words from the verb forms, helping you become more fluent in a natural way. 

Having said that though, I do recognize that the verb forms can be a bit complex, so it’s something to think about down the line as you progress in learning Arabic. 

Basics Of Arabic Grammar

There you go! With these Arabic grammar rules, you’re ready to navigate all the unique features of the Arabic language. 

As you may have already noticed, there’s a lot that goes into Arabic grammar, and it isn’t always breezy. But by being proactive in learning some of the grammar, you can set yourself up to be more effective in learning through immersion. 

The great thing about learning some of the basics of Arabic grammar is that it's absolutely key for reading short stories in Arabic, which can be a window into both the language and culture.

It also sets you up to speak fluently as you invest in learning one of the many Arabic dialects. 

Looking for some helpful resources to begin understanding Arabic grammar in real life? Look no further than Arabic Uncovered!

My course, Arabic Uncovered, teaches you Arabic through the power of story with my StoryLearning® method! With this course, you’ll learn Arabic grammar through an exciting story, not rules. Try it free for 7 days.

Olly Richards

Creator of the StoryLearning® Method

Olly Richards is a renowned polyglot and language learning expert with over 15 years of experience teaching millions through his innovative StoryLearning® method. He is the creator of StoryLearning, one of the world's largest language learning blogs with 500,000+ monthly readers.

Olly has authored 30+ language learning books and courses, including the bestselling "Short Stories" series published by Teach Yourself.

When not developing new teaching methods, Richards practices what he preaches—he speaks 8 languages fluently and continues learning new ones through his own methodology.