Lesson 19– Past tense

I have been thinking... And I believe you are now good enough to understand basic sentences in Czech. So instead of making up dialogues, I decided to take a few lines from Starlight's stories (here in Czech and in English) with appropriate grammar (or in the order they are in), translate them and explain the meaning and grammar. Do not worry, there is no law abuse happening.
But first, I have to tell you something about Czech past tense as the story is written in it. Yes, tense, there's only one past tense.

How to create a sentence in the past tense (=minulý čas)

All tenses affect the verb of a sentence. In the section Verb Conjugations, there are plenty of verbs you can click on to see the way they are conjugated. 

The picture above shows the conjugation of the verb 'otevřít' (to open).

Those are the forms you will use when talking about the past. As you may have noticed, along with the verb that carries the meaning goes a conjugated form of 'být' (to be). You mustn't forget about putting it there. Not even the verb 'být' itself can be used without it. But we're talking about the Czech language so there must be some exception. Of course, the third person of singular and the third person of plural are only consisted of the verb that carries the meaning. See the picture below:

Look at this sentence:

Ráno jsem byla v obchodě. 

(=I was in a shop in the morning.)

ráno, n. (rána; prdg. město) ['ruh:-no] morning; noun

v ['v] in; prep. – connected with the 6th case, therefore 'v obchodě' not 'v obchod'. See the way it's inflected here.

obchod, m. (obchodu; prdg. hrad) ['ob-chod] shop; noun

'Ráno' is the first word of the sentence because I'm emphasizing that I was there in the morning. The word order depends on what you want to stress. To explain this, I'm going to use a couple of examples:

Kdy jsi byla v obchodě? Ráno jsem byla v obchodě.

(When were you in the shop? The speaker is asking a woman, as you may notice.)

Kdo byl ráno v obchodě? Já jsem byla ráno v obchodě.

(Who was in the shop in the morning? The speaker is asking 'kdo' because he/she doesn't know whether it was a man or a woman, therefore it is followed by the form for a male gender.)

Kde jsi byla ráno? V obchodě jsem byla ráno. 

(Where were you in the morning?)

Note that 'ráno' is an adverb, therefore it is never inflected. However, it can be used as a noun and nouns can be inflected. Nemám ráda chladná rána. (=I don't like cold mornings.)

But it doesn't necessarily have to be emphasized to have the privilege to be the first. Because you're talking about the past and thusly, using the past tense, you naturally start by saying when it happened. Like in English. When starting a conversation talking about your holiday for example, you always start with 'Last summer....' or 'When I was in Europe...'

There are also two ways to express the verb. Nevertheless, they are quite simple. You only have to memorize this: If there is any other word preceding the verb, the conjugated verb 'být' will be first and the conjugated verb itself will be second, however, if the verb is starting the sentence, the verbs switch.

Ráno jsem byla v obchodě. Koupila jsem chléb. 

(I was in a shop in the morning. I bought [some] bread.)

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below or send me a message.

love & peace

Ciray