FuSHa to Shami Series #12: Compound Tenses

Editor’s Note & Disclaimer: The core content and linguistic structure of this lesson were originally authored by Chris Hitchcock for the Team Maha website. This post is part of an effort to preserve, organize, and share these invaluable resources for Arabic learners worldwide. Expressing complex temporal relationships in Levantine Arabic (Shami) goes well beyond simple past and present verb conjugations. By combining auxiliary particles like عم (3am) and auxiliary verbs like كان (kaan) and بكون (bikuun), Shami builds a rich system of compound tenses.