Aspect choice in the past tense

Last lesson you met the verb pairs: čitati and pročitati, kupovati and kupiti. Now you put them to work where you will need them most: telling a story about the past. Both members of a pair are perfectly grammatical in the past tense — čitao sam and pročitao sam are both correct Serbian — so nothing forces the choice for you. The choice is about meaning, and this lesson gives you a reliable way to make it.

Two jobs in a story

Every story has two kinds of sentence. Some paint the background: what was going on, what people used to do every day, how long something lasted. Others report an event: something happened once, was completed, and the story moves on. Serbian marks that difference with aspect. The imperfective past is the background — Svako jutro sam plivao u moru (Every morning I swam in the sea). The perfective past is the event — Jednom smo otišli na izlet brodom (Once we went on a boat trip).

• Imperfective past — the camera lingers. Repeated or habitual action ("used to", "every day"), an action going on for a while ("was doing", "all day"), or the setting another event interrupts.
• Perfective past — the camera cuts. A single action seen as a whole, finished, with a result: "finally found", "suddenly started", "read it through".

Let the cue word decide

Most of the time a small word in the sentence has already made the choice for you. Words that say how often or how long pull the imperfective; words that say at one moment pull the perfective.

The pairs in the past tense

Nothing new happens to the form: each member of the pair takes the ordinary past tense you already know, clitic biti plus the l-participle. Here are the pairs this lesson leans on, shown for on (he).

Background and event in one sentence

A story sentence often holds both. The imperfective sets the scene, and a perfective verb cuts into it: Dok smo ručali, stigao je brod (While we were having lunch, the boat arrived). Dok (while) is a strong signal: the verb after dok is almost always imperfective, and the event that interrupts it is perfective. The same pattern works with a contrast: Obično sam ustajao kasno, ali tog jutra sam ustao u šest (I usually got up late, but that morning I got up at six) — the habit is imperfective, the one exception is perfective.

English gives you no help here: "I read a book on holiday" can mean either. Before you pick, ask two questions. Did it happen more than once, or go on for a while? Then imperfective. Was it one finished thing, a step in the story? Then perfective. And there is no separate "used to" form in Serbian — the imperfective past does that job on its own: Svakog leta smo išli na more is both "we went" and "we used to go".

A denial or a general question about the past usually takes the imperfective, because it is about whether the activity ever took place at all, not about one completed instance: Nikad nismo pisali razglednice (We never wrote postcards). The perfective comes back when a single result is at stake: ali te godine smo napisali deset (but that year we wrote ten).