أسمع ضجيجا غريبا.

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Breakdown of أسمع ضجيجا غريبا.

• ضجيج: noise
• غريب: strange; odd

Questions & Answers about أسمع ضجيجا غريبا.

How do you pronounce أسمع ضجيجا غريبا?

A careful fully vowelled pronunciation would be:

أَسْمَعُ ضَجِيجًا غَرِيبًا

A rough English-style transliteration is:

asmaʿu ḍajījan gharīban

A few pronunciation notes:

• أسمع = as-maʿu
  • The final letter ع is a consonant English does not have. It is a deep throat sound.
• ض in ضجيج is an emphatic d-like sound.
• غ in غريب is like a French/German r sound for many learners, produced in the back of the throat.
• The endings -an on ضجيجًا and غريبًا are important in careful Modern Standard Arabic pronunciation.

Why doesn’t the sentence include أنا for I?

Because Arabic verbs already show the subject.

أسمع by itself means I hear / I am hearing.
So the subject أنا is already built into the verb form.

You can say:

أنا أسمع ضجيجًا غريبًا

but that usually adds emphasis, like:

• I hear a strange noise.
• As for me, I hear a strange noise.

In neutral Arabic, leaving out أنا is completely normal.

What exactly does أسمع mean here?