Lingomir
A2 — elementaryPast tenses

The l-participle

Lesson opening

This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.

The l-participle: how a verb gets its past form

To say “I worked” in Serbian, the verb on its own is not enough: Serbian needs a special form, the l-participle (in Serbian radni glagolski pridev, literally the “active verbal adjective”). It is radio “worked”, čitao “read”, video “saw”. Several verb forms are built from it, the way a wall is built from bricks, above all the perfect (radio sam “I worked”), the everyday past tense, which gets the next lesson to itself. Here we learn to make the brick. It is not hard, but it has one sound change and a handful of irregular forms worth knowing on sight.

The l-participle changes like an adjective. It agrees with the subject in gender and number: radio (he worked), radila (she worked), radilo (it worked), radili (they worked). English worked is the same for everybody; Serbian “worked” tells you whether a man, a woman or a thing did the working, and it keeps doing so in the plural. The practical consequence is personal: when you talk about your own past, you pick the form that matches your gender. A man says radio sam, a woman radila sam.

Regular formation: from infinitive to participle

The recipe is simple. Take the infinitive and drop -ti: what is left is the infinitive stem. Glue the gender ending onto it. Here is the full set for raditi “to work”:

The same recipe works for well-behaved verbs of every class: čitati “to read”, videti “to see”, govoriti “to speak”, kupovati “to buy, to shop”. Drop -ti, add the ending:

Notice that the suffix -ova- stays here, unlike in the present tense (kupujem “I buy”, but kupovao, not “kupujao”): the participle is built on the infinitive stem, and that is where -ova- lives. This is the “two stems” rule of the lesson “Infinitive & stems”: the present takes one stem, the past takes the other. Likewise zvati “to call”: zovem in the present, but zvao, zvala in the participle.

Agreement: the participle looks at the subject

Because the participle behaves like an adjective, it adapts to whoever performs the action. English verbs do nothing of the kind, so it is worth watching a few examples:

Cheat sheet

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The l-participle: how a verb gets its past form

The l-participle (radni glagolski pridev) is a form with the suffix -l-, made from the infinitive stem. On its own it is not a tense: it builds the perfect (radio sam), future II (budem radio), the conditional (radio bih) and the pluperfect (bio sam radio).

The full set for raditi

Regular formation

The suffix -ova- stays (kupovao, not “kupujao”), and zvati gives zvao, not a form of zovem: the participle takes the infinitive stem (“two stems”).

Agreement with the subject

Dete is neuter: spavalo. Plural: -li for men or a mixed group, -le for women only, -la for neuter nouns and deca (deca su spavala). Polite Vi: always -li (Vi ste došli).

Common verbs: irregular ones and traps

  • -ći verbs have a masculine in -ao: the fleeting a comes before the old -l (mogao, rekao) and is gone elsewhere: mogla, rekla, išla. So too otići → otišao, otišla; naći → našao, našla; peći → pekao, pekla.
  • Irregular: the -ći verbs and jesti → jeo, pasti → pao, sesti → seo, umreti → umro; learn them by the feminine (došla → došlo, došli, došle). Hteo, bio, uzeo, doneo follow the recipe; only their present is irregular (hoću, sam, uzmem, donesem).
  • Aspect does not change the recipe: raditi → radio, uraditi → uradio; pisati → pisao, napisati → napisao. Radio je ceo dan. He worked all day. (process) Uradio je zadatak. He got the task done. (result)