Number in Arabic — Singular and Dual

0:00 Assalamu alaikum. Welcome to lesson number four. In this lesson inshallah our main learning outcome is to look at the property of number. I've mentioned many times to you already that in Arabic number of an ism can be singular, dual or plural. In English we only have singular and plural. Plural is only two or more in English. In Arabic we have an extra one which is the dual form. So in Arabic we have the singular, the dual and plurals. So far alhamdulillah in the previous three lessons

we've only used singulars. Now we're going to look at duals and plurals. This again this lesson will be split up into parts and the first part inshallah we're going to be looking at singular and duals and at the end of the lesson we will conclude with completing the Muslim table. Alhamdulillah you will see how you can form easily in Arabic 18 words just from the singular word by knowing how to form this table and you'll have also an overview of the four properties of an ism

an in-depth overview inshallah. Alhamdulillah we're now on lesson number four. In lesson one I introduced you to the properties of an ism, the four properties map and alhamdulillah we've already covered definiteness and we know in Arabic either every ism will either be definite which is ma'rifatun or indefinite nakiratun. And then in the next lesson, lesson number three, we covered gender and we know that gender will either be masculine or feminine. Muzakkarun masculine, muannathun feminine. Today we are going to look at number. Number can be in

Arabic singular which is mufrad or it can be jama'un which is plural three or more but we have a dual which is unique in Arabic muthanna. Now muthanna is dual that means two and of course mufrad is one and jama'un in Arabic is three or more. Again we began our journey of course by taking an overview of irab and it is a topic we will be discussing throughout the course inshallah. So it can be either rafa'un nasbun or jarrun. Rafa' nasab or jar for short. Again

we use short form d and i and m and f for masculine feminine and singular s d and p just to keep things simple for us and r n and j. So this is all you needed as an overview we've started our journey alhamdulillah now let us take a closer look at the topic of number. So number every ism will either be singular dual or plural. Now there are no signs specific to recognise whether an ism is singular or not. However dual is very easy in

Arabic dual has only two possible ending either it ends with ani which is for example muslimani which means two muslims or ayni again it means two muslims muslimani muslimayni. For plural there are two types of plural in Arabic one is called sound plural and they have fixed endings and then we have broken plurals which have no fixed endings therefore broken plurals we cannot recognise just from the but just by looking at the word itself. So we have now as far as the sound plural is concerned

there are two types either it will be masculine sound plural or it will be feminine sound plural. Masculine sound plurals end with una or they will end with ina. An example muslimuna or we have muslimina so that's your masculine plural. The feminine sound plural will either end with atun or atin so we have for example muslimatun and we have muslimatin atun atin of course because it has tanween if we put al in front will be almuslimatu almuslimati. So whenever you come across an ism in Arabic

you will not be able to tell whether it is singular or broken plural but if it is a dual you'll be able to easily identify it inshallah and if it's a sound masculine or sound feminine plural just from the suffix at the end i.e the ending you will be able to tell whether it is a sound plural or not. So let's take a closer look at the subject of number.

4:35 From the examples you can see on the screen we have anta which is a pronoun it means you in Arabic. Sayyaratun a car. Ibrahimu name of a person Ibrahim. Mu'minatun a female believer. Rajulun a man. Al masjidu the mosque. Kitabun a book. Allathi the one who. Hiya she which is also another pronoun. Fatimatu Fatimah. Wadin a valley. Misru Egypt. Musa Moses or Musa alayhis salam. Now from the ending or anything else you cannot tell whether these words are singular but from the meaning of course you

can tell that these words refer to a singular ism. So we are going to use the singular as a base form. Please note we are applicable. So we'll use the singular to form the dual and the plural but we will not be able to tell whether that word is singular unless we know the meaning. Once we've learned more categories of isms inshallah majority of them we'll be able to tell but for now please note there is no shortcut way of knowing whether an ism is singular

or not.

5:44 Simply we will use the dictionary or the meaning of the word at our disposal and use that to identify that word as is an ism which is singular. Good news alhamdulillah I hope for majority of the words here you can now at least identify whether they're definite or not whether they're masculine or feminine and of course in most cases you can also tell at least it's arab whether it's rafanasab or jar. So we're now looking at the number how to identify them. What I'd like you

to do before I continue with the subject of number is if you can on a notebook please prepare this table. Now this table should have 18 boxes 18 boxes square. You have on the right hand side nine boxes for masculine you have on the left hand side nine for feminine and on the top row you have your rafanasab and jar and then on the right hand side the rows you have top columns I meant rafanasab and jar and on the right hand side the rows you

have singular dual and plural. This gives you an array of 18 boxes and inshallah you very soon see how easy it is so if you can make this design yourself inshallah in your notebook or it is available as an appendix on in the book itself at e1 you can photocopy inshallah or print whatever's easier and convenient for you. We're going to use this table which I call the Muslim table we're going to complete it in this lesson inshallah and hopefully it will help you visualise all

the four properties and inshallah give you enough practise to be able to recognise them as and when you see them. Using this simple table what we know already the word Muslim in rafa is muslimun in nasab is musliman and in jar it is muslimin. For the feminine form we know how to change from muslim to feminine very easy we have the ta marbuta at the end with the fatha on the mean and we have muslimatun for rafa muslimatan for nasab and muslimatin for jar. You can

see how easy it is alhamdulillah now you can form six words from the base form of the singular just by converting them in the three different as well as the masculine and the feminine set alhamdulillah look how easy it is i can now take these words plus hundreds and hundreds of others and we can also make six words immediately for example let's start with abidun we have abidun abidan abidin make it feminine abidatun abidatan abidatin so with the rest of the words here one two three

four five examples i've given you abidun means a worshipper munafiqun means a hypocrite kafirun a disbeliever salihun a pious person mushrikun an idol worshipper or polytheist using those six words i want you to now write down in your notebook inshallah the six forms three for the masculine three for the feminine and you will see how easy it is now and again every time you do this exercise it will reinforce what you have already learned i hope you have done it if you haven't please do so

at the end of the lesson or whenever you got time make sure you do that exercise now we've dealt with the words before as we had on the screen they were indefinite indefinite i.e any muslim any worshipper any hypocrite any disbeliever etc now if we want to make the same word definite all we do is add al so we end up with al muslimu al muslima al muslimi al muslimatu al muslimata al muslimati now you've got six more 12 words from the base i know this

is simple but please do do it it will give you the confidence that whatever we've learned so far inshallah it will be accumulated and of course the more you practise it will stay with you forever so you now learn how to convert from masculine to feminine how to make the three different arab and also alhamdulillah how to convert it from indefinite to definite by simply adding the al and removing the tanween for the single vowel sign you'll have an array alhamdulillah of now 12 words six

indefinite six definite for muslimun mushrikun kafirun munafikun salihun and you can add abidun and many many other words to it please do carry out this practise so alhamdulillah you will end up with a table that looks like this one for definite one for indefinite and all you will do inshallah for the others mushrikun and salihun for example munafikun abidun you'll end up with 12 words for each if you just carry out this exercise and trust me inshallah all that we've learned in the previous lessons will

now become your cumulative knowledge then we also learned in the previous lessons how to make sentences as well as descriptive phrases muraqab tawsifi and jumla ismiya using the rules that we've already practised so there's new here what i would like you to do is take the vocabulary which is above munafikun which means a hypocrite kathibun means a liar and i want you to translate the english text that i have on the right hand side into arabic so the first example we have i hope you can

recognise the first two are sentences so there are nominal sentences jumla ismiya the hypocrite is a liar and the second one the hypocrite is a liar we want the feminine version please then in example three four five and six we have a lying hypocrite i hope you can recognise that is a muraqab tawsifi or descriptive phrase the the lying hypocrite and both of the masculine and then we have a lying hypocrite feminine and the lying hypocrite feminine complete the task before continuing we need to reinforce

what we are learning otherwise you will be just watching the videos so please pause the video and complete the task before continuing i pray that you have actually written these answers on your notebook if you haven't you're doing yourself a disservice anyway let's continue the hypocrite is a liar i hope you can now see the word munafikun needs to be definite because that is the subject so it'll become al munafikun and of course the word liar will be indefinite kathibun kathibun and then we want to

say the hypocrite is a liar so we need to convert the word to feminine why in bracket i've got the f so i want to say the female hypocrite i will say al munafikatu again please note how i've changed it kathibatun the hypocrite is a liar in bracket feminine so you can see alhamdulillah whatever we've done in the previous lessons we can now put into practise now we want to make the descriptive phrase a lying hypocrite the answer munafikun kathibun i hope inshallah this is not

difficult the descriptive phrase remember the rules uh the noun being described comes first and the description or the adjective comes after and it will copy the four properties of the noun being described which is in this case munafikun and therefore we have kathibun the number is matching the irab is matching the gender is matching so you now have an overview of all the four properties and of course both of them are indefinite then we have the lying hypocrite again it needs to be masculine masculine it

needs to be definite and definite so we have al munafiqu al kathibu reading it together al munafiqul kathibu the lying hypocrite i hope that makes it easy for you inshallah and lastly indefinite feminine version munafiqatun kathibatun and then we have definite version al munafiqatu al kathibatu the lying hypocrite so all the things i practised with you what i asked you to do with the word muslim mu'min munafiq mushrik etc you can see how that knowledge is being used in recognising translating uh forming whatever you want

to do as an exercise uh words which conform to these patterns so now alhamdulillah we are now can use and we have been using singular words and matching them later on of course we will be doing that with duals and plurals so i hope this exercise inshallah reinforces what you have learned the dual al musanna dual alhamdulillah is the easiest in arabic to learn to recognise to use to convert etc why because there are only two possible endings whereas with the plural we have several we

have the masculine we have the feminine version then we have what's called a broken plural which has no form whereas dual inshallah by the end of this lesson you should be able to recognise any ism that has the dual ending and at least identify that it is dual from the suffix that you will see at the end of it inshallah even though you do not know the meaning of the word the dual have the endings of either ani or ayni so the word muslimani means two

muslims muslimani also means two muslims so let's go inshallah look at in detail how this is formed and how the duals are used in arabic so you take the singular muslim in this case the word muslim could be any word muslim and you add a fatha at the end and you add the suffix ani and that's it so let's take the step-by-step instruction we end up with muslimani please note this fatha is essential so it will always be fatha no dhamma kasra or anything muslimani and

the steps are number one put a fatha or zabar on the last letter of the word you're converting from singular to dual once you've done that you add the suffix alif and the noon which gives you the elongated sound meaning you elongate the sound you say ani not muslimani muslimani and that is your two muslims two muslims in the rafa so this is the suffix that you need to remember inshallah this ending ani whenever you see that at the end of an ism you know that

this is dual and it is in the rafa its arab is rafa in order for the nasa bin jar exactly the same step the first step again we put a fatha at the end no matter what the word has originally it will have to have a fatha zabar at the end and we then add our yaa and the noon the yaa has sukoon and the noon has a kasra and of course the obligatory fatha at the end of that so the steps are again put a

fatha on the last letter and then add our yaa and the noon for the nasab and the jar version so you end up with the ani sound ani sound muslimani muslimani muslimani and you can do that with any ism that has a dual from singular to dual for example if i say a book kitabun but i have two books kitabani kitabaini kitabaini as easy as that and that applies across the entire array of duals in arabic i've never come across a rule any situation where this

rule is not followed so these are the only two endings that you need to worry about and it's very very easy here are the steps summarised for you inshallah you're welcome to take a screenshot or pause the video and write these down in your notes you don't really need to if you just practise it a couple of times inshallah you retain it forever it's far easier to do some practise and remember it uh inshallah then to have right pages and pages of notes but i've summarised

it here for you so one is for rafa the other is for nasab or jar so we have the word masjid masjid which means a mosque go ahead and see if you can make the two different version you're going to put the ani and ani at the end let me do it for you inshallah if you just pause the video now and do it let me give you the answers immediately if you want to do it later so you have here masjidani two mosques i have

two mosques in our village masjidani two mosques in the nasab and the jar version you can see exactly what i did with what i did with the word muslim i'm doing exactly the same thing with the word masjid so take one mosque two mosques very easy one variation you may see and let's use the word madrasah madrasatun madrasatan madrasatin you should be able to do that now and you should also recognise that this is feminine has the ta marbuta at the end but i want to

say there are two schools in our village in the rafa the word schools i want to say in the rafa again exactly the same principle ani or ani and ani the only thing to note i if you weren't sure the ta marbuta only appears at the end of a word it cannot appear in the middle or the beginning of a word this is a special writing of the ta marbuta called the raunta whenever something is added to it it converts back to the opanta this is

called the opanta in arabic so you have and that's the only change that you can see so the rules are exactly the same as i've shown you before very rare you will come across changing of the rule at the for the last letter there are occasions when if it's wow or yeah some additional changes but we don't need to worry about that overall the majority would be covered by these two suffixes ending and there is no change on the last letter simply adding a fatah is

the most general rule going back to our amazing muslim table i introduced you to when i did when the singular please have a look alhamdulillah how much progress you've made now so you take the word and you can start filling these 18 boxes at least the first two rows we can now fill so we have 12 words that we've learned how to make from the singular base form where applicable so we have the word muslim we can have muslimun musliman muslimin and then we have muslimani

muslimani and muslimani we've seen now alhamdulillah six forms of the word muslim one for the singular row and then we have the plural again just to repeat so that inshallah stays in your heart nasa bin jar version is exactly identical as you can see you may be asking how do i know the difference very easily from the context and i mentioned that to you when i did the arab and i the rice concept do you remember rice yeah role arab category and expression so these express

their arab with ya and noon for nasa bin jar the other one does ani and of course the singular does the 85 standard don't worry this is going to be covered in more detail not only have we formed six words here but we can now form the six feminine also muslimatun and we have muslimatan and we have muslimatin but now the dual form of that is muslimatani muslimatayni muslimatayni alhamdulillah 12 words from the base form that you could form and if this is the first time

you're going through the videos with me you couldn't do this before say alhamdulillah you can now do this as standard inshallah so why not take advantage of what you have learned and reinforce it in your heart and your mind how take these words mushrikun, salihun, kafirun, munafiqun, abidun and convert them now to the 12 forms that you can see on the screen so for each word you can now form 12 words from the singular base form alhamdulillah not only can you form the 12 you can

also add al to it based on what i taught you in lesson number two so you can have al muslimu al muslima al muslimi single i've done this before but look what happens to the dual now two muslims two female muslims subhanallah now we got 12 from before 12 now 24 words all from the word muslim and not only that alhamdulillah you're getting to practise the masculine the feminine the dual the singular the rafa the nasab the jar and of course definite and indefinite by the

grace of allah azza wa jal this is what how we will learn arabic now let's fork forward to this example what i'd like you to do brothers and sisters is again pause the video this time in your notebook i want you to make the dual form for muslimun which i've already done on the screen for you so that you're not confused what you need to do then you need to do the same thing with the word muslimatun then we have another word baytun which means a

house i hope you know this one already a single ayah i wanted to say two ayah two verses i have memorised okay so i have done two verses instead of one one polytheist or one idol worshipper but i want to say to say two and then the female version of that mushrikatun pause the video take your time inshallah i hope and pray that you are going to complete this exercise once you've done it this knowledge will be with you forever may allah grant you tawfiq please

complete the exercise before continuing if you've done the exercise this is how it will look i've only coloured it in red just to highlight the ending for you of course you don't have to do it one colour will be fine but again it is about reinforcing your heart and your mind and remembering this knowledge forever and again you will come across it throughout your study of quran and hadith and every time you see it you should be able to recognise that it is a dual word

whether it is rafa nasab or jar you should also be able to recognise whether it's definite or indefinite etc etc so please i hope you've done the exercise do check the answers here on the screen and inshallah i hope and pray that you're most of them right one area sometimes causes confusion with new students are certain words that tend to have the ani ending or looks like an ending that we can see now this happens usually when we read text in arabic which do not have

vowel signs as you know normal arabic doesn't after a while inshallah you too and we can develop further knowledge we can may be able to read that through additional courses but at the beginning this will cause you problem because we have here this word here for example bustan you can see it here looks like it ends with an at the end lisan or lisanun salmanu which is the name salman ruthmanu which is the name of man which you're familiar with but my argument with you is

that this is not the same ending even though we have the alif and the noon remember the ending is ani as you will note none of them have a singular kasra and these two words has a single vowel at the top so it is not ani again the hearing you will see it salmanu if you read it with the vowel sign and if you don't read it with the vowel sign you say salman so again it's not the same so just in case you see certain

words which look like alif and noon do not assume it is the dual only time of course if you see the kasra at the end that will be the indication so it is not really an exception these are singular words why because that's what they are inshallah when you've learned the categories you'll recognise them and they have a specific ending but for now please note it is the ani sound not the alif and the noon that you're looking for task for you again brothers and sisters

just to keep you on your feet we know how to make sentences and muraqab tausifi or descriptive phrases so again exactly what we did with the and no change what i'd like you to do i would like you to do the same thing with the dual remember the rules of jumla ismiya the gender and the number of the subject and the predicate should match and muraqab tausifi all the four properties need to match so what we need to do in the first two is form the

sentence the hypocrites are liars of course we're talking about two hypocrites are liars the two hypocrites feminine are liars and then we have two lying hypocrites which is a muraqab tausifi i hope you can recognise that it is a descriptive phrase from the english the two lying hypocrites two lying hypocrites feminine and the two lying hypocrites feminine again pause the video please please complete the exercise and do not worry if you're making mistakes that is the natural way of learning inshallah if you made any mistakes

simply come back and review the answers as i'm giving you on the screen and inshallah this will help reinforce the learning for you so let's go through the answers i want to say the two hypocrites are liars in number seven i have the two hypocrites are liars now again the two hypocrites should be if it's singular al munafiq it should be rafa so what we have al munafiqani rafa dual are liars indefinite sub predicate and the subject is definite i hope inshallah this is not causing

you a major issue so you have definite of course is masculine and we have the number is dual and in the rafa again this is indefinite masculine dual and in the rafa i hope that's easy inshallah for the next answer we have al munafiqatani kathibatani i'm matching here i hope inshallah very easy for you to see so we have definite we have indefinite we have the gender is feminine okay gender is feminine from this ta we know and the gender of this one is also feminine

so the gender is matching the number is dual so this is also dual and this is again rafa and this is also rafa i hope inshallah you've got those two right now as far as the descriptive phrase is concerned all the two parts will match so the the noun being described will will come first and the description of the adjective will come after and the adjective copies whatever the four properties are for itself so again we have here indefinite indefinite masculine masculine and then we have

singular sorry dual and dual and we have rafa and we have rafa and for the descriptive phrase two lying hypocrites masculine the answer is munafiqani kathibani and i hope inshallah we can recognise it's indefinite indefinite masculine masculine dual dual rafa and rafa for the feminine version exactly the same thing we have the two sorry for the masculine version the two lying hypocrites we have definite definite masculine masculine dual dual and in the rafa and the rafa all the four properties matching so again in the second

one is definite the first one is indefinite and please note because i've added al there is no change to the ending why because al only changes when there is tanween as for the feminine version again this is feminine from the ta that you can sell and how i converted to feminine and the dual i've gone through many times with you so we have indefinite indefinite feminine feminine dual again dual and rafa and rafa and for the definite version exactly the same we have definite feminine dual

rafa and for the definite and definite feminine dual and in the rafa the four properties matching please note of course if the moussouf the noun being described was in nasab it will be nasab if it was jar it will be jar of course i don't have the time to do so many variations but you get the idea the noun being described let me clear the screen so you can see it better the noun being described is copying the four properties of the uh sorry the adjective

is copying the four properties of the noun being described alhamdulillah we've completed singular and dual and that is all i needed to share with you towards the end inshallah we'll do a bit more practise with it but for now if you have made a note of what we've gone through that's all you need for the dual inshallah so please please keep a notebook with you of some sort exercise book writing book whatever you call it and use different colour pens pencils whatever to make a note

of what i've given you on the screen and i hope and pray that you are actually doing the exercises it's very important later on when you get a chance after a month or a week or whatever you can review your notes and see how much progress you've made the more you realise how you've learned and how much you move forward more grateful you and i can be to allah subhana wa ta'ala for taking us from very little alhamdulillah to the end now you're forming what eight

uh 12 words uh 12 plus 12 is 24 words masculine feminine dual singular dual definite indefinite masculine feminine etc so this is how your confidence will develop but it is only when you practise inshallah if you don't practise brothers and sisters you are not going to learn jazakumullahu khayran for watching the video may allah bless you with the very best in this world and in the hereafter for your good intentions of learning arabic to understand quran may allah make the task easy for all of us

until the next video assalamu alaikum