Farsi Lessons: Simple Past

In this Farsi lesson you can learn how to conjugate verbs in the simple past. As we'll see, this tense is very easy to build in Farsi! 😊

Words between two slashes are a phonetic representation of the Farsi words, loosely based on the IPA romanization of Persian.

Reminder: Building Blocks

As a reminder, in the last lesson Verb Basics we took a look at various building blocks that we can use when working with verbs in Farsi.

We need two building blocks to form verbs in the simple past:

• The past stem
• The personal endings

Forming the Simple Past

Let's conjugate the verb رَفتَن /raftan/ as an example. We need the past stem رَفت /raft/ and the personal endings.

Review the previous lesson for an overview of the personal endings!

With the past stem and the personal ending in hand, we can now form the verb by simply combining them:

• verb in simple past = past stem + personal ending

Because the past stem can be derived directly from a verb's infinitive, conjugating verbs in the simple past is very simple! 💡

This the resulting conjugation for رَفتَن /raftan/:

Simple Past	Pronoun
رَفتَم َ	مَن
/raftam/	/man/
رَفتی	تو
/rafti/	/to/
رَفتَد	او
/raftad/	/u/
---	---
رَفتیم	ما
/raftim/	/mā/
رَفتید	شُما
/raftid/	/ʃomā/
رَفتَند	آن‌ها
/raftand/	/ānhā/

---

Here are more examples:

• مَن داشتَم /man dāʃtam/ = I had
• او آمَد /u āmad/ = He/She came
• آن‌ها بودَند /ānhā budand/ = They were

Remember that you can derive the past stem from a verb's infinitive by removing the ending «ن َ-» /-an/ 💡

Summary

Forming the simple past in Farsi is very simple when you're familiar with the Verb Basics. Combine the past stem with the personal ending and that's it!

🙌 !ما فارسی یاد می گیریم
/mā fārsi yād migirim/
We're learning Farsi! 🙌