If you are one of those who learn Croatian in order to be able to speak with their older Croatian relatives or maybe grandparents, learning past tense should be quite useful, as you are quite likely to listen about the past – the happy times, the difficult times, the family history, how it used to be… So, here we go… Let’s learn some Croatian! 🙂

For all of you who read our weekly blog posts, by now you probably already know all about the past tense in Croatian, affirmative. If that is so, you’ll probably find this post about the past tense in Croatian, negative, a piece of cake.

If you want to make a negative sentence in the past tense, just use this scheme:

NEGATIVE PAST TENSE = NEGATIVE BITI (TO BE) + MAIN VERB with one of the following endings:

Singular: -O (masculine) / -LA (feminine) / -LO (neuter)
Plural:     -LI (masculine) / -LE (feminine) / -LA (neuter)

Just as a reminder, here’s what the negative forms of the auxiliary verb biti (to be) look like:

Step two is the same as in the affirmative form: add the appropriate ending to the main verb.  As the majority of verbs in Croatian end in -ti, what you need to do is just remove that final -ti and add one of the endings shown in the scheme above:  -O (masculine) / -LA (feminine) / -LO (neuter) for singular, or  -LI (masculine) / -LE (feminine) / -LA for plural.  

And that’s it! Now we are ready to take a look at what the negative form of the past tense in Croatian looks like. We will use the verb učiti (to learn) as an example:

*In Croatian, ono (it) does not refer to an object, but to any neuter noun, even if it means a person, like dijete (child). So, ono nije učilo can mean dijete nije učilo.

Here are some more examples:

So I guess I can drop the subject here as well?

You are right. Just like in other tenses – the present tense or the future tense – the subject (e.g.: ja, ti, on, Ana, Ivan…) can be left out from the sentence, and Croats tend to do that whenever the context allows it, i.e. whenever it’s clear who they’re talking about. As we hope you have learned by now, this is true for all kinds of sentences (affirmative, negative or interrogative) in all tenses, because the form of the verb itself always tells you who the subject is.

Therefore, the sentences above work perfectly fine if you drop the subject, i.e. the personal pronoun in brackets. What is more, you don’t even have to change the word order – meaning, the auxiliary verb biti (to be) still comes before the main verb, since the negative forms of the verb biti (to be) are not enclitic forms, so the rules about the word order that we wrote about in our previous post do not apply here.

So:

Have you already mastered the genders of verbs in the past tense? Let us know how you feel using the verbs in their past tense form. 

Exercise: Write the suitable negative past tense form of the verbs in brackets. If there’s a pronoun (ja, ti, on…) with the verb, it suggests who the subject is, but you must not use it in the sentence.

For example: __Nije učila__ (učiti, ona) hrvatski jezik.

Do you have any questions about the past tense of verbs in Croatian, the negative form?

If you want to learn Croatian online with a teacher one-on-one, don’t hesitate to book your free trial lesson here.

Learning Croatian continues… Next Tuesday we are learning about the interrogative form of the past tense. If you want us to send you an email with the next Croatian grammar lesson, put your email address here.