English Translation
it seems to me.
Why (in the present tense) is it spoken nir’a and not nir’e?
Based on the writing (without vowels), the sentence could say either “nir’eh li” (present) or “nir’ah li” (past). However, the audio says “nir’ah li”.
I spoke to a friend of mine who is a native Hebrew speaker, and he told me that in this context, the forms “nir’eh” and “nir’ah” are mostly interchangeable in colloquial speech – the difference between past and present is largely ignored. He also told me that both “zeh nir’eh li” and “zeh nir’ah li” can be used to mean “I like this one” (which is the translation at Tatoeba). However, that presumes a special context, such as being in a store where a clerk asked which of several items a customer would like to buy.
By the way, the site pealim.com is a good resource for looking up a conjugated form of a verb. Here’s a search for נראה: