Learn how to say "not" and "don't have"
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| Salām be hamegi! Man Anita hastam. Hi everybody! I’m Anita |
| Welcome to PersianPod101.com’s “Persian in 3 minutes.” The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Persian. |
| In our previous lessons, we learned how to use the verbs hast and dāshtan. In this lesson, we’re going to learn how to turn these two verbs into their negative forms in order to say "I'm not" and "I don't have." |
| So let's see an example. Imagine you are about to go to a party with a Persian friend. You ask him if he is ready, and he answers Na, āmāde nistam. |
| Then, you ask him if he has a car to use to go to the party and he says Na, Māshin nadāram. |
| You saw two negative sentences. Let's break down the first one. |
| Na, āmāde nistam. means "No, I'm not ready". |
| [slowly] Na, āmāde nistam. |
| Āmāde means “to be ready.” |
| nistam means "I am not". The way to make sentences negative is the reverse of English here. You put āmāde before nistam, "I am not". |
| Do you remember the verb “to be,” hast? |
| The negative form of hast is nist. You just need to change this and then add the suffix to match the pronoun like we did with hast before. |
| Nistam, I am not |
| Nisti, You are not |
| Nist, he, she, or it is not |
| Nistim, We are not |
| Nistid, You are not (plural/formal) |
| Nistand, They are not |
| Now you know all the negative versions of “to be!” Let's go back to the original sentence. Do you understand it better? |
| Na, āmāde nistam. |
| If your friend *were* ready, he would have said āmāde hastam. “I am ready.” But he said āmāde nistam. |
| So basically, you just have to change hast to nist, that's all! |
| Now let's look at an example with the verb dāshtan "to have". |
| "I have a car" is Māshin dāram. and "I don't have a car" is Māshin nadāram. |
| Do you see the difference? In the negative verb, there is a na added before dāram. This is what makes it negative. |
| Easy, right? So, do you want to make all the negative versions of dāshtan? |
| Nadāram, I don't have |
| Nadāri, You don't have |
| Nadārad, he, she, it doesn't have |
| Nadārim, We don't have |
| Nadārid, You don't have (plural/formal) |
| Nadārand, They don't have |
| So, it's very easy to make hast and dāshtan into the negative form. But for other Persian verbs, there is a slight difference. |
| Let's focus for a moment: |
| In Persian, when making most verbs negative, you put either NA or NE before them. But which one? That depends on the verb stem. In Persian we have many different - and somewhat difficult - stem forms of verbs. But don’t worry! I can show you an easy way to know where to use NE or NA. |
| In Persian, sometimes there is a Mi before a verb. Mikhoram (I am eating) Miravam (I am going) Mikonam (I am doing...) and so on. But as you can see, these are all verbs that are happening "now". In other words, Mi has the same usage as "ing" in English. |
| Now, the NE would ONLY go before all those verbs with a Mi before them. So you get nemi khoram, nemi ravam, and so on. Most other verbs, except some special verbs like hast, will be made negative by adding Na. |
| So now you can turn many sentences into negative form just by adding these two little words NE or NA and memorizing some verbs like Hast's negative form, nist. |
| Now it’s time for Anita's Advice. |
| If you want to answer negatively but without being too direct, or if you don't want to be completely negative, you can use common words like Kheili meaning "very" or Hanooz meaning "yet" before them. Kheili nadāram means "I don't have much". Kheili nist means "it's not much". |
| Hanooz āmāde nistam means "I am not ready yet" and Hanooz māshin nadārām means "I don't have a car yet". |
| Get ready for the next lesson because we are going to study a really important part of the Persian language: using adjectives. |
| I'll be waiting for you in the next “Persian in 3 minutes” lesson! |
| Khodāfez! |
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