Morphology
Word classes and inflection
Morphology covers the parts of speech and their grammatical categories. For nouns and pronouns, master number, definiteness (the article -ը/-ն), and the seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, instrumental and locative. Learn the main declension patterns and the irregulars (մարդ - մարդու, ջուր - ջրի). For adjectives, note that they generally do not agree in number or case. For verbs, know person, number, tense, mood, voice and aspect; be able to identify present, past imperfect, aorist, future, perfect and pluperfect forms, and the indicative, imperative, subjunctive and conditional moods. The infinitive ends in -ել or -ալ, and participles and converbs are frequent in exam sentences.
Traps
Questions often exploit case syncretism (one ending for several cases), the difference between the genitive and dative, and the auxiliary լինել in compound tenses. Do not confuse a verbal noun with a finite verb, and do not label every -ած form as a participle without checking its function.
Worked example
Գրքում։ This is the singular locative of գիրք 'book': գիրք - գրքի - գրքում. The ending -ում marks location, so the form answers the question որտե՞ղ. If the sentence were Գրքի մասին, the genitive would be required instead.
Rule of thumb
Parse by stem + ending + grammatical meaning, and always check the form inside its sentence before naming the category.