Words in this Lesson

biserică	church
lună	moon
film	movie
apă minerală	mineral water
munţi	mountains
prieten	friend (male)

 

Lesson 8: Past Tense

There are about four different ways of forming the past tense in Romanian. In this lesson we will cover two kinds of past tenses called the "compound past" and the "simple past". We will also review some time expression often used in conjunction with the past. The compound past is usually used to describe an action that happened only once: I ate dinner at Raul's house last night. We went to a movie. The compound past is formed by a conjugated form of "to have" plus the past participle of the verb. The shortened form of "to have" as used for past tenses follows:

eu am	I've
tu ai	you've
el / ea a	he's / she's
noi am	we've
voi aţi	you've
ei / ele au	they've

The past participle is formed from the infinitive of the verb following a few fairly simple rules. It might be easier at first to simply memorize the past participles of the more commonly used verbs (note: past participles can also be used as adjectives! -more on that later).

For starters, let's look at the past tense of a face meaning "to do" or "to make": The past participle of face is făcut. You would use this in conjunction with the shortened form of a avea to form the past. Confused? Just look at the examples! am făcut = I made ai făcut = you made a făcut = he/she made am făcut = we made aţi făcut = you made au făcut = they made

You may notice the past tense for eu and noi is exactly the same: am făcut. You can use the personal pronouns to stress who is the doer of the action. Eu am făcut. I did. Noi am făcut. We did.

Here are some examples of basic verbs and their past participles:

Infinitive	Past Participle	Definition
face	făcut	make / do
vorbi	vorbit	speak
merge	mers	go
da	dat	give
mînca	mîncat	eat
primi	primit	receive
bea	băut	drink
veni	venit	come
spune	spus	say
avea	avut	have
fi	fost	be

Here are some simple rules to follow to divine the past participle. There are a number of exceptions to the rules however, so a list of common irregular verbs will follow.