Learn about the Romanian tenses
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Intro |
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| Antoni: How many tenses are there in Romanian? |
| Anna: And how do they work? |
| Antoni: At RomanianPod101.com, we hear these questions often. Imagine this scene: Sasha Lee is confused about the number of tenses in Romanian. She asks her teacher, Corina Craciun, "How many tenses are there in Romanian?" |
| Sasha Lee: Câte timpuri sunt în română? |
| Dialogue |
| Sasha Lee: Câte timpuri sunt în română? |
| Corina Crăciun: Sunt 3 timpuri principale. |
| Antoni: Once more with the English translation. |
| Sasha Lee: Câte timpuri sunt în română? |
| Antoni: "How many tenses are there in Romanian?" |
| Corina Crăciun: Sunt 3 timpuri principale. |
| Antoni: "There are 3 main tenses." |
Lesson focus |
| Antoni: In this lesson, you will be learning how many tenses there are in Romanian and how they work. As you heard Corina say in the dialogue, there are three primary tenses in Romanian. This is the same as in English, where the primary tenses are the past, present, and future. That said, Romanian is pretty unique when it comes to tense. This is partly because its verbal conjugation system is based on an ancient, colloquial form of Latin referred to as "Vulgar Latin." What this means for you, the student of Romanian, is that there are quite a number of verb conjugations to learn. Before we get into talking about specific examples of the conjugations according to the tenses, it's important to explain one or two other things first. |
| One of the unique characteristics of the Romanian language is that it has nine moods! English only has four—the indicative, imperative, subjunctive, and infinitive. Let's look at three of these moods as a means of explaining what is meant by the "mood" of a sentence. |
| The indicative, or |
| Anna: indicativul |
| Antoni: in Romanian, is the one most commonly used in English and in Romanian. We use this mood when we state facts and opinions such as "this food is delicious," or "the moon is round." |
| The imperative or |
| Anna: imperativul |
| Antoni: mood is used to give instructions or orders in which the pronoun "you" is often implied, as in, "Look at the moon!" There is frequently an exclamation mark at the end of sentences in this mood. |
| The subjunctive mood or |
| Anna: subjonctiv |
| Antoni: is the one we use when we want to express a wish, when we want to suggest or propose something, or when we are talking about a hypothetical or imagined situation. In Romanian, there is no term for a subjunctive mood. Instead, the most closely related mood is the optative-conditional or |
| Anna: condițional-optativul. |
| Antoni: In Romanian, each mood requires specific tenses, and verbs are conjugated in a certain way depending on which mood is active. The good news is that, although there are nine moods in Romanian, not all of them have tenses and, of those that do have tenses, the indicative mood is the one that has the most. The other moods mostly have one or two tenses. Only the presumptive mood has three. |
| The next thing that you need to know about before we move on to specific examples of tenses in Romanian is "person." Most people know about the first, second, and third-person forms of pronouns, such as "I," "you" and "he" or "she" and so on, but what's very important to note about Romanian is that often these pronouns are not explicitly mentioned in a sentence. They can be implied through the conjugation of the verb. A simple example is if we compare the Romanian for "I did" or |
| Anna: făcui |
| Antoni: with the Romanian for "you did," which sounds like this: |
| Anna: făcuși. |
| Antoni: Notice that the pronouns themselves were not used in Romanian. Instead, the suffixes of the verbs were changed so that they would imply the appropriate pronouns. When the plural pronouns are used, the suffixes will change again. This is why it's important to take "person" into account when considering tenses in Romanian. Because the conjugation of the verb is different depending on person, number, mood, and tense, there are quite a variety of conjugations one must learn as a student of Romanian. It would be advisable, therefore, to take the time to find a table of these and memorize as many of them as you can, as soon as you can. The sooner you do this, the better, because it will make everything a lot easier as you continue with your Romanian studies. Knowing the four Romanian verb groups helps to make this task simpler. More about that later in the lesson. |
| Now that you have a basic overview of mood, person, and tense in Romanian, we can soon get on with looking at some specific examples. One last thing that needs to be pointed out is that, while Romanian only has three primary tenses, each of these can be subdivided, resulting in quite a few versions of each primary tense. For the purposes of this lesson, we will mostly be discussing those moods and tenses which will be of greatest practical use to you, since they are the most commonly used. |
| The first mood we will be looking at is the indicative mood. It is the most common mood and contains the most common tenses too. Let's start with the past tense. There are four past tenses in the indicative mood in Romanian, but two of them are more commonly used than the others. They are the simple perfect or |
| Anna: perfectul simplu |
| Antoni: and the compound perfect or |
| Anna: perfectul compus. |
| Antoni: Another form of the past tense, is the imperfect or |
| Anna: imperfect |
| Antoni: This is the tense that you would use when you want to talk about something in the past that is unfinished or incomplete.These three tenses will be discussed in detail in Lesson 23 so we are only mentioning them in passing for this lesson. Let's have a quick look at the last of the four past tenses before we move on to a discussion of the present tense in Romanian. The pluperfect is used when we want to say something like "I had done." This phrase conjugates in Romanian in this way in the first, second, and third person singular, are respectively: |
| Anna: făcusem, făcuseși, făcuse |
| Antoni: and this is how it conjugates in the plural of the first, second, and third persons, respectively: |
| Anna: făcuserăm, făcuserăți, făcuseră. |
| Antoni: Great! Now that we've had a look at the past tense in Romanian, we are ready to move on to the present tense. In English, we use the present progressive tense to talk about things that are occurring right now, and we use the simple present tense to talk about things that occur in a general way or about things that occur with varying degrees of frequency. This is not true of Romanian, however. In Romanian, the simple present tense is used for both of these instances. Here is an example of the present progressive as it is formed in Romanian: |
| Anna: Fac yoga. |
| Antoni: This means "I am doing yoga." And now let's hear the simple present with a sentence meaning "I do yoga every morning:" |
| Anna: Fac yoga în fiecare dimineață. |
| Antoni: In both of those examples, the Romanian verb for "to do" was conjugated as |
| Anna: fac |
| Antoni: because that is the present tense conjugation in the first person. It does not change, despite the fact that they would be two different tenses in English. Let's hear how the same verb is conjugated in the second and then the third person in Romanian: |
| Anna: faci, face. |
| Antoni: And now with the plurals "we," "you," and "they" respectively: |
| Anna: facem, faceți, fac. |
| Antoni: So far, we have discussed a few of the tenses in the indicative mood so let's quickly have a look at the Romanian version of the subjunctive for a change. This is a good point to talk about because the subjunctive really uses the same conjugations as the indicative present, except in the case of the pronouns "he," "she," "it," and "they." When these pronouns are present in a sentence in the subjunctive mood, the verb must end with |
| Anna: -ască. |
| Antoni: The subjunctive mood is used for expressing wishes or talking about hypothetical situations, but, in Romanian, we must also remember that it is used whenever the connecting word |
| Anna: să |
| Antoni: is present in an expression. Let's hear an example of the subjunctive in the third person, using the connecting word and the correct conjugation of the verb: |
| Anna: Aș fi vrut ca el să vorbească cu noi. |
| Antoni: This means "I wish he would talk to us." The verb that was used was |
| Anna: vorbească |
| Antoni: in which you can hear the ending |
| Anna: -ască. |
| Antoni: In this next sentence, you will hear the first person being used: |
| Anna: Aș vrea să pot. |
| Antoni: This sentence means "I wish I could" and, as you heard, it also contained the connecting word |
| Anna: să. |
| Antoni: We will now look at the future tense in the indicative mood. Fortunately, this is the easiest Romanian tense to learn. This is partly because there is no real future tense in Romanian—not in the same sense that English has a future tense at least. In Romanian, if you want to form the future tense, a helping verb is needed and that verb is "to want" or |
| Anna: a vrea. |
| Antoni: It requires conjugation, of course, and, in addition to that, it must be connected to the infinitive. In effect, one is saying "I want to," but the translation is the same as "I will." Of course, this raises the question: What if a person wants to say "I want to" instead of "I will?" The answer is that, grammatically speaking, there is no way to distinguish between the two. Only the context will allow which one is implied. If someone says |
| Anna: Ne vom întâlni din nou, |
| Antoni: when you are leaving them, then it is clear that they mean "We will meet again" and not "We want to meet again." |
| Now let's quickly look at how to conjugate the verbal construction "will do" in the future tense in Romanian. We'll start with the singular pronouns in the first, second, and third person, respectively: |
| Anna: voi face, vei face, va face... |
| Antoni: and then the plural pronouns in the same order: |
| Anna: vom face, veți face, vor face... |
| Antoni: We have now covered many of the most common tenses you will encounter in the Romanian language. Next, we will briefly review what these were. |
| [Summary] |
| Antoni: So far, in this lesson, you have learned that there are nine moods in Romanian. The tenses are different for each mood because the verbs conjugate differently, depending on the mood. Not all the moods contain tenses though! The conjugations of the verbs also imply which pronoun is being used, so pronouns are often not present in Romanian sentences, and the verbs conjugate differently for each separate pronoun. For this reason, it is a good idea to find a table of verb conjugations to study. Doing so will help you make rapid progress while you are learning Romanian. |
| Expansion/Contrast (Optional) |
| Antoni: Earlier, it was mentioned that, in Romanian, there are four verb groups. This is a good place to start when learning how to conjugate verbs in Romanian. Let's quickly have a look at these. Type one verbs are those that end in |
| Anna: -a |
| Antoni: such as |
| Anna: înota |
| Antoni: which means "to swim." It should be pointed out, however, that some of these verbs end in |
| Anna: –ez. |
| Antoni: The second type of verbs consists of those ending in |
| Anna: -ea |
| Antoni: and that's it. Once you know how to conjugate one of these verbs, you know how to conjugate them all. The third type of verbs is just as easy, consisting only of verbs ending in |
| Anna: -e. |
| Antoni: The fourth type will require a little more effort to learn though. This group includes verbs that end in |
| Anna: -i |
| Antoni: or |
| Anna: -î. |
| Antoni: It also includes verbs that end in |
| Anna: -esc |
| Antoni: and |
| Anna: -ăsc. |
| Antoni: And those are the four groups or types of verbs. It bears repeating that you should learn these as soon as possible in order to expedite your learning of the Romanian language. |
| Cultural Insight/Expansion (Optional) |
| Antoni: One somewhat confusing feature of the Romanian language is that, while it has no future tense in the same sense that English has one, this non-existent future tense actually comes in four different forms! The one we talked about earlier was the one that most people mean when they talk about the future tense in Romanian. There are also two forms of the future that are referred to as "popular" and this is because they are less formal and used mostly in spoken Romanian. Actually, it's quite easy to use one of these forms of the popular future as you only have to add |
| Anna: o |
| Antoni: for all persons before the verb conjugated in the conjunctive mood, as in: |
| Anna: o să fac. |
| Antoni: And, finally, there is the future perfect, which uses constructions such as "I will have done" or |
| Anna: voi fi făcut |
| Antoni: All these unusual conventions make Romanian a unique language and, for that reason, a fascinating one. Enjoy your studies further! |
Outro |
| Antoni: Do you have any more questions? We're here to answer them! |
| Anna: La revedere. |
| Antoni: See you soon! |
| Credits: Anna (Romanian, Romania), Antoni (English, synthetic voice) |
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