Tenses II

The present tense

The present tense has already been discussed in the previous chapter. For completness of this article we put the same pattern tables here as well. Note that the verb pattern can be unambiguously determined by the 1. person singular form of the verb.

-e- pattern (for verbs ending with -u in 1. p. sg.)
i.e.: začít - začnu - začal (to start)

Note that the stem "začne" loses the ending -e- in the 1. person singular and 3. person plural form.

-í- pattern (for verbs ending with -ím in 1. p. sg.)
i.e.: prosit - prosím - prosil (to beg)

-á- pattern (for verbs ending with -ám in 1. p. sg.)
i.e.: dělat - dělám - dělal (to do)

Note that in the third person plural the á added to the root looses it's prolongation and becomes a simple a.

Also note that the -e- pattern allows an informal form in it's 1. person plural i.e. začnem (without the final e). Notice that the other two patterns wouldn't allow such a thing, since the result would then collide with their's 1. person singular forms.

The future tense

The future tense is formed with yet another auxiliary tense of the verb být - jsem - byl but this times it gets composed with infinitive. The forms of the auxiliary verb are:

Attentive reader will notice that it is in fact a regular verb corresponding the -e- conjugation pattern.

We will show the full future tense conjugation on the verb nakupovat - nakupuju - nakupoval (to buy):

Note that the future tense is very easy.

The verb být - jsem - byl (to be) in various tenses

Since the verb být - jsem - byl (to be) serves as an auxiliary verb in every tense other than present one may ask how does these tenses look like for the verb být - jsem - byl itself? For the tenses with the l-form (the past tense and the conditional) we use the l-form byl and we proceed in a regular way as with other verbs. For the future tense however we do not use the infintive být, instead we use the auxiliary plainly without any infinitive to it.

být - jsem - byl (to be) in the past tense (masculine)

být - jsem - byl (to be) in the conditional (masculine)

být - jsem - byl (to be) in the future tense

The negation

In all the tenses in Czech the negation is expressed through adding the prefix ne- to the verb. In present tense it's very straightforward, since their is only one verb, in other tenses that use the auxiliray verbs it get's slightly more complicated. For the tenses using the l-form (the past tense and the conditional) the prefix ne- is attached to the l-form. For the future tense, the prefix ne- gets attached to the auxiliary verb budu. The table below shows a great summary taking the verb mít - mám - měl (to have) as an example.

The perfectness and imperfectness

In Czech there are no perfect or imperfect tenses, yet this concept of perfectness exists well in the language. Every verb in Czech is either perfect (dokonavé) or imperfect (nedokonavé) by it's nature meaning that every tense formed with a perfect verb is perfect in a way and every tense formed with an imperfect verb is imperfect in a way.

To give an example take a look at verbs jíst - jím - jedl and sníst - sním - snědl both meaning "to eat" in english, yet jíst is imperfect verb by it's nature and sníst is a perfect one. The various combinations of tenses and perfectness may be translated as follows, but bare in mind that these translations are only approximations not one to one correspondences!

Note that the perfect verbs cannot form the future tense.

However the learner is strongly discouraged to rely on these translations instead of building his own intuition by reading and listening the language in any of it's forms.

This is bigger topic that will not be discussed in depth in this article and is mentioned only for completness.

Conclusion

We've covered most of what the czech system of verbs has to offer. Two major topics that we haven't discussed are the passive tense and the imperative. The reason for this is that they both formally exist for every verb, yet they often change stem in an iregular way (as for the 1. person singular) and at the same time their usage is very limited which makes them a horrible price/efficiency deal. The learner is encouraged to acquire the most used imperative forms later on and the most used passive forms very very later on.

We've showed that the past tense and the conditional both use the l-form together with an auxiliary verb být - jsem - byl in some form. The l-form needs to carry one more information unlike other verb forms and that's the gender of the doer. The future tense is fairly simple and uses the infinitive form together with a special form of the verb být - jsem - byl that actually acts as a regular verb on it's own.

We've also went through the negation, that appeared to be an easy process as well and we've touched a little the topic of perfectness and the word ordering. Two topics we will cover fully later on.