الفنان حط القماش جنب اللوحة.

حط is past tense, specifically third person masculine singular.

So in this sentence it means he put, and the he is الفنان.

• الفنان = the artist
• حط = put / placed

If you wanted the present tense in Levantine, you would usually say something like بيحط = he puts / he is putting.

Because حط is the normal everyday Levantine way to say put / place.

• حط = colloquial, very common in speech
• وضع = more formal / MSA / written style

So if you are learning spoken Levantine, حط is exactly the kind of verb you want to know.

الـ is the Arabic definite article, meaning the.

In this sentence:

• الفنان = the artist
• القماش = the cloth / fabric
• اللوحة = the painting / board

So Arabic is marking those nouns as definite, just like English uses the.

A common Levantine-style pronunciation would be roughly:

il-fannān ḥaṭṭ il-qamāsh janb il-lawḥa

A few helpful notes:

• ح is a stronger, breathier sound than English h
• ط is an emphatic t
• حط has a doubled final consonant, so it is more like ḥaṭṭ
• In many urban Levantine accents, ق may sound like a glottal stop, so القماش may sound more like il-ʔamāsh

You do not need perfect pronunciation right away, but it helps to notice that حط is short and strong.

جنب means next to / beside here.

Literally, it comes from the idea of side, but in everyday speech it functions very much like a preposition.

So:

• جنب اللوحة = next to the painting

A useful thing to know is that جنب can also take pronoun endings:

• جنبي = next to me
• جنبك = next to you
• جنبها = next to her

Because Arabic does not need it here.

In English, learners sometimes expect something like put to somewhere, but in Arabic you can simply say:

• حط القماش جنب اللوحة

That is already complete and natural:

• verb = حط
• object = القماش
• location = جنب اللوحة

So جنب itself gives the location idea, and no extra to is needed.

Yes.

The sentence you have is subject + verb + object + location:

• الفنان حط القماش جنب اللوحة

That is very common in Levantine.

You could also say:

• حط الفنان القماش جنب اللوحة

This is also understandable. In spoken Levantine, subject-first order is especially common, so the original sentence sounds very natural.

Because the verb agrees with the subject, not with the object or the location noun.

Here the subject is:

• الفنان = the artist

So the verb is masculine singular:

• حط = he put

The other nouns are not the subject:

• القماش = the thing being put
• اللوحة = the thing it is next to

If the subject changed, the verb would change too. For example:

• الفنانة حطّت = the female artist put
• الفنانين حطّوا = the artists put

Because this is spoken Levantine, not formal written Arabic.

In MSA, you might learn endings like:

• -u
• -a
• -i

But in Levantine speech, those case endings are not used. So you simply get:

• الفنان حط القماش جنب اللوحة

This is one reason spoken Arabic often feels simpler than fully vocalized MSA.

Yes, a little.

القماش usually means cloth / fabric. Depending on context, it can sometimes refer to material used in art, but its basic meaning is still fabric/cloth.

اللوحة has a wider range of meanings depending on context, such as:

• painting
• panel
• board
• sign

In an art context, learners will often understand it as painting or artwork.

So even if you already know the overall meaning of the sentence, it is useful to know that these words can be flexible in real usage.