The perfect (perfekat)

Lesson opening

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

The perfect: the main past tense of Serbian

Radio sam “I worked”, došla je “she came”, bili smo “we were”. This is the perfect (perfekat), the main past tense of Serbian. It is built from two parts: the short form of biti “to be” (sam, si, je…) and the l-participle. This one tense covers almost everything English says with worked, was working, has worked and did work. Serbian does have other past tenses (the aorist, the imperfect, the pluperfect), but in everyday speech the perfect has taken over almost all of their work, so this is the past you will speak.

You already know both halves. The participle (radio, radila, radilo) is from the previous lesson, “The l-participle”. The short “be” (sam, si, je, smo, ste, su) comes from the lesson “biti in the present”. There it was the linking verb (Ja sam student “I am a student”); here it becomes the helper of the past (Radio sam “I worked”). What is new here is not the forms but the assembly: how the parts agree, where they stand in the sentence, how you negate them and how you ask questions.

Every person: short biti + participle

Here is the perfect of raditi “to work” in every person. The pronouns are there for clarity; in speech they are usually left out. The participle changes for gender and number; the auxiliary changes for person:

The auxiliary shows the person (sam = I, si = you, je = he/she/it), and the participle shows gender and number (radio masculine, radila feminine, radili plural). Between them they encode everything: Radila sam means “I (a woman) worked”, where sam supplies the “I” and radila supplies “female, one person”. English worked carries none of this: the person lives in the pronoun (I, she, they), and gender is not marked at all. In Serbian the auxiliary already gives the person, so the pronoun can go. The plural keeps the gender too (radili, radile), where English has one worked. With polite Vi the participle always ends in -li, even when you speak to one woman: Vi ste radili (“T–V address (ti/Vi)”).

Word order: the clitic looks for second place

The auxiliary sam is a clitic, so the rule is simple: look at the word or group of words that opens the sentence, and put the auxiliary straight after it:

The same thought can start in different ways: Radio sam juče, Juče sam radio, Ja sam juče radio. All three mean “I worked yesterday”; only what comes first, and so what is highlighted, changes. If there is nothing else to put first, the participle itself comes first: Radio sam. But you can never start with the clitic: nobody says “Sam radio”. In Video sam ga na pijaci a whole little chain of clitics has lined up behind the first word: sam (the auxiliary) and ga (the short form of “him”). The order inside such a chain is strict; the section “The auxiliary and short object pronouns” below deals with it.

Cheat sheet

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The perfect: the main past tense

The perfect (perfekat) is the main past tense, almost the only one in speech: English worked, was working, has worked. Formula: the short (clitic) form of biti, sam, si, je, smo, ste, su, plus the l-participle, agreeing with the subject in gender and number. The auxiliary carries person, the participle gender and number. Aspect gives the shade: Radio sam ceo dan (process) vs Uradio sam zadatak (result).

Every person: clitic + participle

Word order: the clitic takes second place

Negation and questions

Time words