Arabic Tenses Made Easy

I think I am actually in decent shape for tomorrow's Arabic placement exam, as it's only 4:30pm and I can mostly devote myself to vocab, since I think I have grammar or or less under control. The following notes are totally irrelevant to almost anyone reading this, but they make me feel good.

Present Tense (Al-Mudaar3)

There are three forms of the present tense, the "default" being al-marfoo3. Al-marfoo3 takes the damma ending except in the forms where it ends in nuun, in which case it takes fatha.

The second form, al-mansoob, removes all the nuun endings from the marfoo3 conjugations and replaces the damma endings with fathas. In addition to being used when negating future tense verbs (see below), the mansoob form is also used after "li" and "an" in place of the gerund to communicate intent or act as an infinitive.

The third form, al-majzoom, also removes all the nuun endings from the marfoo3 conjugations, but it replaces the damma endings with sukuun.

Past Tense (Al-Madi)

The past tense reverts to the root of the verb and adds certain endings (both suffixes and short vowels) to match the different personal pronouns.

The past is negated EITHER by adding "ma" before the past tense verb, OR by adding "lam" before the present tense verb in majzoom form.

Future Tense (Al-Mustaqbal)

The future tense is created simply by adding the prefix "sa" (or the whole word "sawaf") before the present tense verb in marfoo3 form.

The future tense is negated by deleting the future prefix and by adding "lan" before the present tense verb now in mansoob form.