B2 — upper-intermediateTense, mood and aspect synthesis

The tense system in overview

Lesson opening

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

The tense system: a map with seven squares

You have met the Serbian tenses one at a time: the present at the very start, the perfect and Future I in the foundations of the course, Future II only recently. Here they are on one page, to answer the question that has been building up: how many tenses does Serbian actually have, and which of them do people really speak?

Serbian grammars give the same answer to the first half: seven. The answer to the second half is reassuring: in everyday speech, three do the work. There are almost no new forms here, just a map: what sits where, what has pushed out what, what you need in tomorrow’s conversation and what you only need to recognise in a book. You need it now, because the course is heading for the aorist, the imperfect and the pluperfect, tenses you will meet in books far more often than in conversation, and without the map you might think you must start using them in speech at once.

Definition

Serbian has seven verb tenses (glagolska vremena): the present (prezent), the perfect (perfekat), the aorist (aorist), the imperfect (imperfekat), the pluperfect (pluskvamperfekat), Future I (futur prvi) and Future II (futur drugi); four of them are past tenses. By structure they are either simple (one word: the present, the aorist, the imperfect) or compound (an auxiliary verb plus a participle or an infinitive). By use they fall into a living core (the present, the perfect, Future I), a narrow periphery (Future II, the pluperfect) and a bookish pole (the aorist, the imperfect). Next to the tenses stand the moods, the imperative (radi!) and the conditional, the Serbian “would” (radio bih): they say not when something happens but whether it is an order, a wish or only a possibility.

Seven tenses on one page

Here is the whole system at once. Each tense is built on raditi “to work” and doći “to come”; a clitic is a short unstressed word (sam, ću) that can never come first in a sentence. The third column says where you will meet the tense.

Examples

Tense	How it is built (I / he)	Where you meet it
present	radim, radi; dolazim, dolazi: an ending on the stem	core: everywhere, every day
perfect	radio sam, radio je; došao sam, došla je: the clitic sam plus the l-participle	core: the ordinary past in speech, in writing, in the news
Future I	radiću, radiće; doći ću, doći će: the clitic ću plus the infinitive	core: the ordinary future, everywhere
Future II	budem radio, bude radio; budem došao: budem plus the l-participle	in speech and writing, but only in a clause after ako, kad, dok, čim, ko
pluperfect	bio sam radio, bejah radio: a past form of biti plus the l-participle	rare: the perfect is taking over its job; bejah radio is bookish
aorist	rekoh, reče; dođoh, dođe; odoh, ode: one word, usually from perfective verbs	books, folk songs; in speech, short exclamations and dialects
imperfect	gledah, gledaše; bejah, bejaše: one word in -ah, -jah, -ijah	almost only literature and old texts

Notice the imbalance: four of the seven squares are taken by the past and only two by the future. That is inheritance, not design: the oldest Slavic texts already have four past tenses, while each Slavic language built its ordinary future later, in its own way. Serbian built it from “want”, Czech and Polish from “be”.

Deeper sources

Seven squares: how the grammars count the tenses

The number is worth seeing at its source. The secondary-school textbook Gramatika srpskoga jezika by Živojin Stanojčić and Ljubomir Popović lists exactly these seven personal forms as glagolska vremena, and keeps them apart from the glagolski načini (the moods) and from the non-finite forms: the infinitive, the participles, the verbal adverbs. Gramatika srpskog jezika (2005) by the Serbian linguist Ivan Klajn gives the same seven.

There is a dispute at the edge of the list. Some descriptions place Future II on the border between tense and mood: it has a shade of supposition, and it only ever appears in a subordinate clause, so it does not behave like a full tense. “Seven” is the count of the school tradition; functionally there are fewer independent tenses.

Simple and compound: how the tenses are put together

The first way to cut the map is by structure. Three tenses are simple: there is one word, and the verb itself carries everything. Four are compound: an auxiliary takes care of the person, and the main verb stands in a form that does not change for person, the l-participle or the infinitive.

Examples

Type	Tenses	What it is made of
simple	present, aorist, imperfect	stem plus a personal ending: radim, rekoh, gledah
compound, on the l-participle	perfect, pluperfect, Future II	an auxiliary plus radio, radila, radili: radio sam, bio sam radio, budem radio
compound, on the infinitive	Future I	a clitic plus the infinitive: ću raditi, written as one word radiću

This gives you a useful conclusion. One l-participle serves four forms: radio sam (perfect), bio sam radio (pluperfect), budem radio (Future II) and, outside the tenses, radio bih (the conditional). Only the auxiliary changes: once you learned the participle in the lesson “The l-participle”, you had four squares at once. The simple tenses need their own personal endings, and that is why the aorist and the imperfect stand apart.

Deeper etymology

Radio sam: a participle plus “to be”

Word for word, radio sam is “worked I-am”. In fact the recipe is familiar: English builds its perfect from an auxiliary and a participle (I have worked), and French and German use “to be” for many verbs (je suis venu, ich bin gekommen). Serbian uses “to be” for every verb. The Proto-Slavic suffix *-lŭ formed a participle (*dělalŭ “having done”, *reklŭ “having said”), and the perfect was the verb “to be” plus that participle: exactly radio sam, letter for letter.

This is why the Serbian past has gender: a participle is adjective-like and agrees with the subject, as in French il est venu but elle est venue: radio sam (a man), radila sam (a woman), radili smo (a group). Some Slavic languages later dropped the auxiliary, and the bare participle became their past tense, with gender but no person. Serbian kept it, so its perfect changes for person as well: radio sam, radio si, radio je.

The core: the three tenses people speak in

Keep only the squares you cannot get through a day without, and three remain. They cover nearly all everyday conversation.

The present (prezent): three classes of endings, -am, -im, -em, covered in the lesson “Present tense”. It means more than “now”: it also carries habits, timetables and settled plans, as English does in the train leaves at six and I’m flying tomorrow. A plan in the present needs an imperfective verb: Sutra putujem, Dolazim u osam. So “I’m coming tomorrow” is Sutra dolazim, not “Sutra dođem”: a perfective verb in the present is normally no future on its own (lesson “Future plans & intentions”).

The perfect (perfekat) is the all-purpose past, and this is the key fact of the whole map. Serbian does not share out the past among tenses according to whether an action lasted or was completed. Any past action, finished or unfinished, done once or repeated, goes into the perfect, and completion is carried by the verb’s aspect, as the lesson “Aspect in the past” showed. Where English picks between watched, was watching, used to watch and have watched, Serbian keeps one tense and picks the verb.

Cheat sheet

The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.

The tense system: a map with seven squares

Seven tenses, three in everyday speech. Aspect lives in the verb, not in the choice of tense.

Seven tenses

Examples

Tense	Built (I / he)	Where you meet it
present	radim, radi	core, everywhere; habits, timetables, settled plans (imperfective)
perfect	radio sam, došla je: sam + l-participle	core; the ordinary past in speech, writing, the news
Future I	radiću, doći ću: ću + infinitive	core; the ordinary future, both aspects (uradiću)
Future II	budem radio: budem + l-participle	only in a clause after ako, kad, dok, čim, ko
pluperfect	bio sam radio, bejah radio	rare; replaced by the perfect with već
aorist	rekoh, reče, rekosmo, rekoše	usually perfective; books, exclamations (Ode voz!), dialects
imperfect	gledah, gledaše, gledahu	imperfective; literature, old texts

By structure

simple (one word): present, aorist, imperfect
on the l-participle: perfect, pluperfect, Future II, and also the conditional radio bih
on the infinitive: Future I ću raditi, written together radiću (but doći ću)
spotting the aorist and imperfect: one word, “I” in -h (rekoh, gledah); “he” without -še in the aorist (reče), with -še in the imperfect (gledaše)

What to choose

Examples

You want to say	Form
now, regularly	Radim u banci.
a settled plan, a timetable	present, imperfective verb: Sutra putujem.
a promise, “I’ll do it”	Future I: Doći ću sutra.
a finished past event	perfect, perfective verb: Juče sam završio izveštaj.
a past process or habit	perfect, imperfective verb: Juče sam radio.
a past before a past	Već su otišli, less often bili su otišli
future condition or time, perfective verb	perfective present: Kad dođem, zvaću te.
future condition or time, imperfective verb or biti	Future II: Ako budem imao vremena, javiću se.
an imagined condition	conditional: Kad bih imao vremena, putovao bih.
a story about the past	perfect: background imperfective, events perfective
a sudden event in a book	aorist: I on ode bez reči.
a lasting background in literature	imperfect: Sunce zalažaše nad rekom.

Not tenses

moods: conditional I and II (radio bih, bio bih radio), imperative (radi!)
non-finite forms: raditi, radeći, uradivši, radio, urađen