Same thought.
Different shape.

Gender can change from language to language

A noun’s grammatical gender is a feature of that language—not a property shared by the thing itself. Adjectives and articles may agree with the noun.

↳ The flower is feminine in French and Arabic but masculine in Italian. The street is feminine in French and Italian but masculine in Arabic. In “white flower,” the adjective changes to agree with the noun in French, Italian, and Arabic; English adjectives do not change.

Reflexive verbs: doing something to yourself

French and Italian commonly use a short pronoun with reflexive verbs. But the same idea does not always use a reflexive verb in every language: English may use an ordinary verb or “myself,” and Arabic often uses a different verb or construction.

↳ French se lever, se souvenir, and se sentir, and Italian alzarsi, ricordarsi, and sentirsi are reflexive in these examples. Their English and Arabic equivalents are not necessarily reflexive. Arabic also has أَغْتَسِلُ (aghtasilu, “I bathe / wash myself”).

Negation takes different shapes

Even the simple idea “I do not understand” is built differently.

↳ English uses do not + verb; standard French places ne … pas around the verb (often just pas in casual speech); Italian puts non before it. Standard Arabic uses lā before the present-tense verb. Arabic negation also varies with tense and dialect.

Conjugation: endings, helpers, and roots

Conjugation changes a verb to show things like person, number, and tense. English uses a relatively small set of verb endings and often relies on helper words; French and Italian have more distinct endings.

↳ A common Arabic root is ك-ت-ب (k-t-b), associated with writing. Patterns add vowels and sometimes extra consonants: كَتَبَ (kataba, “he wrote”), كاتِب (kātib, “writer”), and كِتاب (kitāb, “book”). Root-and-pattern is a useful guide, though not every word is formed in a perfectly predictable way.

A root can also build a word for a place

A common place-noun pattern starts with مـ (m-) and fits the root into a template. Some place nouns use a feminine ending ـة (-a); the exact pattern depends on the word.

↳ Think of the root consonants as the core idea and the pattern as a template. For instance, the m- place pattern appears in maktab and malʿab; madrasa uses a feminine pattern ending in ة (-a). This is a useful pattern, not a rule that every place name is made by simply adding m and tāʾ marbūṭa.

The letter C—and the Arabic letter ج

The Latin letter C is named differently in English, French, and Italian, and its sound in a word depends on the language and what follows it. Arabic script has no C. The distinct Arabic letter ج is called jīm; it is not the Arabic alphabet’s third letter.