Daily lessons · Day 22 of 90
You finished this day
Past tense: what you did
Talk about yesterday
Everything you have said so far has been about now or about the future. Today you get the past, and it is one of the easier things in Japanese: no irregular verbs to memorise, no auxiliary to add, just a different ending on the same stem you already use. The one trap is adjectives, which have their own past and do not borrow です's.
Verbs in the past
Swap ます for ました. That is the whole rule:
Japanese has one past tense where English has several. ました covers ate, have eaten, had eaten and did eat, and context supplies the rest. That is a genuine simplification, and it is worth noticing because English speakers often go looking for a perfect tense that does not exist here.
Nouns and な-adjectives in the past
です becomes でした, exactly as you would hope:
Notice that じゃなかった is just じゃない with the い-adjective past ending stuck on it. Japanese does this constantly: it builds long forms out of short ones you already know rather than inventing new words. When a form looks intimidating, try taking it apart before you memorise it.
い-adjectives in the past
This is the one that catches people, so it gets its own section:
たのしいでした is wrong for the same reason たかいでした was wrong on day 15: the い-adjective carries the tense itself, so です has nothing left to do but be polite, and politeness has no past. If you catch yourself reaching for でした after an い-adjective, the かった is what you want.
Carry over, from earlier days
Check yourself
8 questions. Nothing is saved unless you finish.