Al-Raf'
Al-Nasb
Al-Jarr
Al-Jazm
The vowel on the last letter of a word indicates which case it is in.
Al-Raf' and Al-Nasb occur in both nouns and verbs.
Al-Jarr occurs only in nouns.
Al-Jazm occurs only in verbs.
Al-Raf' is indicated by a dammah
Al-Nasb is indicated by a fatha
Al-Jarr is indicated by a kasrah
Al-Jazm is indicated by sukun
Once you have the states memorized, you can use the information to understand the grammatical place of each word in a sentence and translate it.
Consider the following. If you know that the subject of a verbal sentence, in Arabic, has dammah on the last letter (i.e. it is Al-Raf') and the object of the verbal sentence has a fatha on the last letter (i.e. is in Al-Nasb) you can use this information to understand the sentence.
ضرب البنتَ الوالدُ
The first word is Daraba which is the verb and it means to hit.
The second word is Al-Bint which means daughter. It has a fatha on the last letter so it means it is the object of the sentence. The object of a sentence is a word upon which the action of the verb takes place.
The third word in the sentence is Al-Waalid which means father. It has dammah on the last letter. It is the subject of the sentence. The subject is the word which performs the action of the verb.
So, all in all you know the verb, the subject who carried out the verb, and whom it was carried out on.
The action of hitting was carried out by the father on the daughter. So, the sentence translates to:
The father hit the daughter.
Since the subject and object are recognized by the vowel sign on the last letter, word order in Arabic does not really matter. You could have written the above as
ضرب الوالدُ البنتَ
And it would still mean The father hit the daughter. This is the normal word order in English but in Arabic it is not word order but the vowels on the last letter which help you recognize which is the subject, object, etc.
