The Need for Colors

Beyond the rules governing the conjugation of measures and person and tense there are 5 letters it appears that we need to memorize for each and every verb: the three Radical consonants (aka the tri-literal root) and two middle vowels: the vowel used on the middle radical in imperfect conjugation and the vowel used in perfect conjugations.  Here's how we are memorizing the Radicals:

In stories set in a country starting with a particular letter, we work with 10 or so verbs that also start with that same letter.  That gives us the first radical.  Then, if the sounds are normal light letters like English or completely unambiguous like the letter R, then we can make whole word associations to something in English to capture the other two radicals.  If one of the radicals is a Dark or ambiguous letter, we can use the animal Icon from the alphabet series or we can use one of the animal alphabet accessories I put up in an earlier post.

Finally, we've got to set up two colors for each Verb image covering the perfect and imperfect conjugations to indicate one of our three vowels:

Red = FatHa
Blue = Damma
Yellow = kasRa

In the first place or top place we'll indicate the Perfect vowel.
Then in the second place or bottom place we'll indicate the Imperfect vowel.

For example, I used a bottle (b-d-l) to give me the three radicals in the last story of Bahrain for "to swap or change."  The perfect vowel is "a" (fatHa), RED; the imperfect vowel is "u" (Damma), BLUE.  So I need to visualize my bottle as having a bright RED nipple attached to a BLUE bottle.

I'm not 100% sure how these vowels apply in all of the conjugations, but I'm going to trust that Hans Wehr knows what he's talking about when he gives those two vowels to us to memorize in each dictionary entry.  We'll see as we go along how exactly they apply.