Revision: Arabic Word States

In trying to learn Arabic, I haven’t focused too much on the technical names and grammatical explanations for things. That is by design for the course I am taking with Arabica Institute; learn by doing/speaking rather than focusing on grammar. It’s worked so far in that I think I am making decent progress. However, my teacher recently asked me something which should be quite simple but because I haven’t focused on grammar and technical definitions too much, I couldn’t answer simple terminology questions.

We were reading out some sentences and the question was “is this word الْمَجْرُورُ, الْمَنْصُوبُ , الْمَرْفُوعُ?”

For the life of me I could not remember what those terms meant because we’ve always just referred to words being in an up, down or default state. I quickly looked it up on the way home from work on the train. Here’s what I revised.

The terms الْمَجْرُورُ, الْمَنْصُوبُ , الْمَرْفُوعُ refer to the state of a word denoted by it ending in a dhamma, fatha or kasra. Honestly, this is basic stuff. Not going into the rules that make a word those states but noting down the terminology.

The terminology is not important for speaking but I write this down as a revision for myself. The trick is to practice it. It’s very difficult to learn things just by reading grammar rules and memorizing grammar terms. As always, I am only a student so if you spot any mistakes let me know.