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Unfortunately for us, the root form of the verb is only one out of many forms that can be found! What about the present, the future and all the other people that might do something?

Well, although I said learning lists is an odd way to learn, we still do need some as reference. Since Arabic courses use the root فَعَلَ , so will I!

Here are the past forms. All the changes to the root are made to the end of the word:

	Feminine			Masculine
PLURAL	DUAL	SINGULAR	PLURAL	DUAL	SINGULAR	Person
						1st - I, We
						2nd - You
						3rd - He, She, It, They

Now if you want to learn all these off by heart, that is up to you. But it isn't necessary. Only three of the forms are in frequent use in the quraan, and if you are struggling to identify a word, then there only a few things to check to see if it is one of the others!

The really common forms are - 'they somethinged', - 'we somethinged' and the root 'he somethinged'.

It happens that نا is also a suffix for 'ours' or 'us' (like هم was for 'them' and 'their'). Can you tell the difference between 'he created us' , where نا has been added to the 3rd person singular masculine, and 'we created' which is the 1st person dual/plural form?

Hopefully you spotted the following:

1st word could be a verb 'they somethinged'
4th word could have an 'us/ours' ending, possibly on a verb 'he somethinged'
5th word is a singular noun.

The root of the first word looks like قال , but I don't find that in my dictionary! Of course we have one of those 'weak' root letters, and looking up قول gives 'said, spoke, uttered', while قيل gives 'slept at noon, drank/milked at noon'.

It might be that the quraan is discussing a siesta, but a bit of context here will help. The previous verse ended 'did a warner not come to you?' So most likely this is an answer to that question 'They said...'.
This also helps understand the next word.   بل or the variation here is simply a refutation of a negatively phrased question. So you could translate it as simply 'yes' or 'on the contrary'.

قد is a word I often ignore until other information is in! It can mean 'had, already, just now, sometimes, certainly'.

Next up we have a root to search for with a weak letter in the middle. I cannot find anything under جاء or جوء, but under جيء is 'came, was present, befell'. Adding the suffix this makes 'he came to us'

Lastly, we have a singular noun from root نذر - 'a warner'

So we have something like 'They said 'On the contrary, certainly came to us a warner' or 'had come to us a warner'.
Probably you would render this in more comfortable English as 'They said 'yes, a warner certainly came to us' or something like that. But this is not just randomly changing the word order. The noun ends in a nominitive (subject) ending, and you have already seen a structure 'verb, subject(doer)' in the previous lesson, so the fact that the warner is the subject in the phrase 'came to us a warner' is there in the Arabic grammar.

Recognising a couple of the common forms of the past tense.

By reviewing the table of forms, realisng there are only a couple of different leters that are added to the past form - this wll make it easy for you to quickly accept/reject when trying to identify an unknown word.

The suffix نا for us/ours.

'On the contrary' بل

The troublesome word قد - leave it to last and use context!

Once again a 'verb, subject' structure has been seen.

Once again you've seen a noun that has a ي between the second and third root letters.

Once again, the need to check several roots when there is a weak letter (و, ا or ي) involved.

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