"اَلْقِراءة شَيْء مُهِمّ."
Translation:Reading is an important thing.
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It's hard to know just where the "is" goes. I would have thought this would translate to "Reading something is important." (But I would have been wrong!)
The verb "to be" is omitted in Arabic in present tense. Examples: .هو معلم (huwa mu3allim) - He is a teacher. .هي طالبة (hiya Taaliba) - She is a student. .هو كسول (huwa kasuul) - He is lazy.
Yes, but that doesn't answer the issue: we need to place "is" somewhere, but the question was how to know where (before or after "(some)thing").
We can make many sentences with these words, all having different meanings: "Reading is an important thing", "Reading something is important", "Reading an important thing"...
I guess the answer is that we haven't learned the accusative form yet, which would be needed for those last two translations, so we can't translate it that way.
