هي عم بتشرب حليب.

هي means she.

In Levantine, it is often pronounced something like hiyye or hiyyi, not like the English word he. So the beginning of the sentence sounds more like hiyye than hee.

In Arabic, the present-tense verb to be is usually not stated.

So where English says She is drinking milk, Levantine Arabic simply says She drinking milk, with the verb form and context doing the job.

That is completely normal:

• هي عم بتشرب حليب = She is drinking milk
• There is no separate word equivalent to English is here

عم is a very common Levantine marker that shows an action is in progress right now.

So it gives the sentence the sense of:

• is drinking
• is currently drinking

Without عم, the sentence would usually sound more like a general or habitual statement, depending on context.

بتشرب is the verb drink in the present/imperfect form here.

It comes from the root related to drinking: ش ر ب.

In this sentence, بتشرب means she drinks or, with عم, she is drinking.

So:

• عم بتشرب = is drinking

This is a very common thing in Levantine verbs.

You can think of بتشرب as having two important parts at the beginning:

• بـ = a common Levantine present/non-past marker
• تـ = part of the subject agreement pattern

So بتشرب is the normal Levantine-style present form.

For learners, the easiest practical idea is:

• بـ often shows you are in the present/non-past
• the rest of the verb tells you which subject it matches

Not always. By itself, بتشرب can be ambiguous in some Levantine varieties, because the same form can also be used for you (masculine singular).

But in this sentence, there is no confusion because the subject هي is already there, so it clearly means she drinks / she is drinking.

Because حليب here means milk in a general, indefinite sense, not the milk.

This is similar to English, where we often just say:

• She is drinking milk

not necessarily:

• She is drinking the milk

So:

• حليب = milk
• الحليب = the milk

Yes, very often you can.

Arabic verbs already contain information about the subject, so speakers often drop the pronoun when it is clear from context.

So both of these can work:

• هي عم بتشرب حليب
• عم بتشرب حليب

The version with هي can sound more explicit, or it may be used for emphasis or clarity.

This is an important difference.

• هي بتشرب حليب usually means she drinks milk or she does drink milk
• هي عم بتشرب حليب means she is drinking milk right now

So عم is what gives the clear ongoing, right-now meaning.

You would change both the pronoun and the verb form:

• هي عم بتشرب حليب = She is drinking milk
• هو عم بيشرب حليب = He is drinking milk

Notice:

• هي = she
• هو = he
• بتشرب changes to بيشرب

A common Levantine way is:

• هي ما عم بتشرب حليب

In some areas, you may also hear forms with مش or مو, but ما عم بتشرب is a very useful pattern to know.

So:

• هي عم بتشرب حليب = She is drinking milk
• هي ما عم بتشرب حليب = She is not drinking milk

A simple learner-friendly pronunciation is:

hiyye ʿam btishrab ḥalib

Very roughly:

• هي = hiyye
• عم = ʿam
• بتشرب = btishrab
• حليب = ḥalib

A few pronunciation notes:

• ع in عم is a throat sound that English does not really have
• ح in حليب is a stronger, breathier h
• btishrab may feel difficult at first because of the consonant cluster at the beginning

This sentence is specifically Levantine colloquial Arabic.

The main clue is عم used this way for the progressive (is drinking). That is a dialect feature, not standard Modern Standard Arabic style.

A native speaker would immediately recognize this as spoken dialect, not formal written Arabic.