Questions & Answers about صديقتي كانت بالمكتبة عم تدور على كتاب عربي جديد.
صديقتي breaks down as:
- صديقة = a female friend
- -ي = my
So صديقتي literally means my female friend.
A native English speaker often wonders why there is no separate word for my. In Arabic, possession is very often shown by adding a suffix directly to the noun.
Also note:
- صديق = male friend
- صديقة = female friend
So the -ة helps mark the noun as feminine, and the -ي adds the meaning my.
كانت is the feminine past form of كان (to be / to be in a certain state).
Here it is used to help form a past continuous idea:
- كانت عم تدور = she was looking
- literally something like she was in the process of looking
Because the subject is صديقتي (my female friend), the verb must be feminine, so we use كانت rather than كان.
A quick comparison:
- كان = he was
- كانت = she was