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Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 24 Past Tense 142 / 600

ići (ide, išao, išla) go

peći (peče, pekao, pekla) bake

vući (vuče, vukao, vukla) pull

Some verbs with infinitives in -sti have a bit specific past-f form as well:

gristi (grize, grizao, grizla) bite

rasti (raste, rastao, rasla) grow

Verbs like vidjeti see – actually, all verbs ending in -jeti, including razumjeti

understand – always have the following forms in the past: ®

inf past-m past-f

see vidjeti vidio vidjela

understand razumjeti razumio razumjela

For instance:

Vidio sam Anu. A I saw Ana. (I = male)

Vidjela sam Anu A . I saw Ana. (I = female)

Razumio sam ga A . I understood him. (I = male)

3m/n

Nismo ih A razumjeli. We didn’t understand them.

3pl

This is yet another instance where past forms are more regular then the present

tense. I will normally list the past forms for such verbs too, but sometimes I omit

them and write just ... to make the text more compact.

Once in a while, you’ll see and hear another past tense, the aorist tense ®. It’s most

common used in the first person, and its forms are just one word; for instance, the

1st person aorist form is usually obtained by replacing the infinitive -ti with -h, e.g.

vidjeh I saw. For a fuller description, see 99 Aorist Tense and Other Marginal

Features.

For a full discussion of various verb types, check A3 Verbs.

Finally, there are many verbs in Croatian which mean some action was brought to

completion. Such verbs are rarely used in the present tense, since present tense is

understood as ongoing, but they are frequent in the past tense. For example, the

verb pročitati means read completely. In the past tense, such verbs usually

correspond to simple English tenses, while normal verbs often correspond to

continuous tenses:

Čitao sam knjigu A . lit. ‘I was reading the book.’

Pročitao sam knjigu A . lit. ‘I’ve read the book completely.’

Such verbs – implying completion – are called perfective: they will be explained in

depth in 37 Complete Reading: Perfective Verbs and later chapters. You will

encounter some of them in examples in the following sections. For now, it’s enough

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