Unlike English Arabic adjectives follow the noun they modify, which is somehow easier, because when you

start with the noun first you will easily modify the adjective that comes afterwards accordingly either to its masculine, feminine, dual or plural form.

A small house: baitun sagheer

(literally house small).

Just like Spanish & German , Arabic has masculine and feminine adjective forms, we learned in a previous lesson how to form the feminine from masculine in nouns, same steps will be taken to form feminine adjectives too. Lets go over the rule of forming feminine from masculine form, which includes feminine adjectives with some:

In Arabic to form a feminine adjective from the masculine, you simply add taa marbuta which looks like ( , ) to the end of the adjective for example:

Big: Kabeer Small: Sagheer

(masculine)

Arabic Adjectives Big: kabeera (feminine) Small: sagheera Beautiful: jameela (feminine) (feminine)

(masculine) (masculine)

Beautiful: Jameel

Note that adding the taa marbuta , is not always the case to form the feminine of a masculine adjective. There are some exceptions to this: Colors and most adjectives starting with a for example take in most cases a different form, which is represented in this model word (?a??aa), the steps to model our feminine irregular adjective is: extract the consonants from the masculine adjective and place them respectively in the place of the question marks, here are some examples: Blue azraq (masculine) zrq (raw consonants) replacing the ??? with the consonants) (?a??aa) raw model zarqaa bakmaa (after (after

Dumb abkam (masculine) bkm (raw consonants) replacing the ??? with the consonants)

(?a??aa) raw model

If you are looking for a more extensive Arabic course, we recommend Breaking The Arabic Code

Dual Adjectives in Arabic:

To form a dual masculine adjective in Arabic we simply add aan note that you can do that even with adjectives starting with a , Big kabeer (masculine singular) (masculine singular) Big kabeeraan

to the end of the adjective,

(masculine dual) (masculine dual)

Blue azraq

Blue azraqaan

To form a dual feminine adjective add ataan Big kabeer (masculine singular) Big

to the masculine adjective: (feminine dual)

kabeerataan

For adjectives starting with a the dual feminine will take the ?a??awataan form, by replacing the question marks with our consonants: Blue azraq (masculine singular) Blue zarqawaan ? of ?a??awataan with azraq consonants) (feminine dual) (after replacing the

Plural adjective in Arabic:

The way to form a plural adjective is the same way you form a plural noun, we already discussed that in a separate page (forming the plural) Just remember that the adjective follows the noun, and not the opposite like in English.

Good: jayyed Bad: sayye