C: Case

Nouns and adjectives in Arabic are declined for case. Part One of this book will focus a great deal of attention. If you are new to the language, it may interest you to note that American students of this language have a very tough time with cases. But cases in Arabic are very easy. Although case may seem to be a foreign concept to you, you should have little trouble with it here. Many languages have many more cases than Arabic does and they are much more complicated.

Case refers to the form a noun or an adjective takes depending on its function in a sentence. For example, a noun functioning as the subject of a sentence will have a different case than it would have if it were the direct object. In general, different cases are indicated by changes in the voweling attached to the ends of nouns and adjectives. In Arabic there are three cases. We will do one case in this lesson, another in the next lesson, and the last case will be covered in lesson three. At that point you will know about 90 percent of everything you will ever need to know about case. The rest of what you will need to know will be treated at appropriate times in this book.

Case endings in Arabic are applied to most nouns and adjectives. They are not applied to the pronouns such as انا and أنت, nor do they apply to singular demonstratives such as هذه and هذا. Case is not applied at all to words used to form questions such as أينَ and مَن Furthermore, this text will not use any cases with proper nouns. There will be plenty of examples below so you will see what is going on and how easy it really is.

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