In which the author complains.

Learning a language that's very similar to one you already know is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, there's all the cognate words and similar grammar. On the other, there's the false cognates, and the grammatical rules that are just different enough to get you in trouble. For instance, the past tense verb conjugations in Hebrew are almost identical to those in Arabic. Easy enough. The present tense conjugations, however are not. Oh no, that would be too simple. Instead, the present tense in Arabic corresponds to the future tense in Hebrew. The Hebrew present tense doesn't correspond to any conjugation pattern in formal Arabic, but is similar to the present tense in some of the colloquial Arabic dialects, which is annoying, because I always prided myself on speaking _proper_ Arabiyya Fus'ha. I must find the person responsible for this outrage and rant to him/her/it at great length...

Edit: Mystery solved. First, the background: Classical Hebrew, along with Arabic, has the standard semitic pattern of 2 "real" tenses, and a few modified moods that correspond to tenses found in other languages. The tenses are "Perfect", which usually corresponds to the past tense in Indo-European languages, and the "Imperfect", which acts as both present and generalized future, with an explicit future made by adding an auxiliary word before the imperfect. One of the interesting things about semitic languages is that with simple declarative sentences, you don't actually _need_ a verb. Putting an undefined noun (or adjective) after a defined one, or a pronoun, implies a "to be" relationship (For example, "Al-kitabu qadimun", "The book [is] old" or "Ana maridh min hazha al-karj", (I [am] sick of this shit"), which is otherwise almost never conjugated for present tense.

So, what modern Hebrew speakers have done is taken the active participle nouns of the verbs, use _them_ for the "present tense" of those verbs, and reserved the Imperfect tense for future, only. So really, the "present tense verbs" in modern Hebrew, are actually all nouns, the sneaky bastards. Of course, Modern Hebrew has also completely lost case inflection, so this fact is lost on native speakers. Also, it intensely annoys me that it took me so long to realize that is what the Syrian (I think) dialect of Arabic was doing. Or whichever dialect it was, it's been a while. Still, it should have been obvious. :-P