50 Shades of "Imperfect" 

A very nerd journey

Did I mention that this confusion is another fine product of the Alliance Française? She's just the latest in a long line of people I've seen struggling or unhappy after working with them. I didn't intervene at the time because I prefer to mind my own business with flatmates. Still, it got me thinking again about how truly complex it must be for speakers of languages without this distinction to grasp it fully.

I would like to go through what I know in the languages I master: Italian/French, Dutch, Russian, and Persian. I find it fascinating to see the differences. Sometimes they share a name, sometimes they do not, but there is some sort of affinity… Let's start this journey.

The name in French and Italian

First of all, the basics: why this name in the Latin languages?

"Imperfetto" (in Italian) and "imparfait" (in French) a tricky denomination because nowadays we link words like this to the idea of "perfection," something done in the best possible way that cannot get any better than this.

However, it's misleading.

It comes from the idea of "incompleteness" or at least the irrelevance of its completeness. Is it complete or not? That's not the focus of the tense. We're just talking about the past, without any special emphasis on whether the action is still ongoing or not.

I like calling it "the tense of the background actions" or "the tense of habits," because these two are the main use cases in Italian/French.

How do we call it in Persian?

We use the name "gozashte-ye estemrari", which means "continuous, progressive" past. Again, it's misleading, so don't be fooled because it doesn't correspond to the actual past continuous in English - they do have another form for that!

Actually, in 90% of cases, that's the exact equivalent of the "imperfetto/imparfait," but with some remarkable exceptions. Compared to French and Italian, the duration of an action is more relevant in Persian, whereas in these two other languages, we would use the Past Simple (in the English sense)… which, by the way, is one of the situations where it overlaps with the Present Perfect in English!

I have always asked myself...

I always asked myself...

A little problem with "budan" and "dashtan"

Moreover, another significant problem for Persian speakers is that the verbs "to be" (budan) and "to have" (dashtan) — which are also common as one of the parts of compounded verbs — don't have an imperfect form! That's a relevant problem for Persian-speaking learners of other languages where this difference is so crucial. It's a very peculiar situation because, as long as they use any other verb, the number of mistakes is extremely limited, but it skyrockets only with these two ones (and their derived verbs, like "to love" - dust dashtan).

Hence, I came up with a trick.

If other verbs are not a problem, then why not try to reword those sentences containing "to have/to be" with a synonym where we can see the difference?

"Bud" is "was", but can be both meant as "used to be" or "was" .

What if, instead of saying "was", we say "he behaved well"? We have to use another verb: "raftar kardan" (to behave). And here we can see the clear difference in the conjugation.

Dar bachegi, khub raftar mikard

The same problem can happen with "dust dashtan" (to love, to like) which can be sort of replaced with "pasandidan" (to appreciate). Of course, I take for granted that the modified sentences may sound weird or unnatural, but the point is just to see the option we would choose because it allows us to avoid a mistake or two.

Does this tense exist in English?

And here... I think about English!

How to get this difference, if you're an English speaker or you struggle with it because for example you speak Russian and you're learning French through English and have no clue about how to translate the sentence "when I was at home"?

We have a couple of clues:

• If your English is good enough, you know the use of "used to/would" to speak about a situation in the past. The issue is that the Past Simple can also be a choice, but it's not precise enough and we need a way to distinguish the case
• If you imagine the situation you're describing as the stage of a theatre, you can identify what's on the background and what's the main focus

In Russian, "byl" and "chital" are unclear.  

The case of Russian and Slavic languages in general

Russian is a particular case, because there is only one past tense and the nuance is given by the choice of the verb (perfective or imperfective).

What's frustrating is that we cannot always have a reliable correspondence between the imperfective or perfective form of a verb and their counterpart in French/Italian.

I can say:

Kogda ja zhil v Moskve...  

"Zhil" is the imperfective form of the verb "zhit'", to live, corresponding to an imperfect form in French/Italian).

But:

Ja bolshe nichevo ne delal...  

"Delal" is still an imperfective form, but it corresponds to the other past form in Italian/French, because in Russian the sense of duration is more relevant - a bit like for their Persian neighbours.

And what about the other languages halfway between English and the Slavic world?

The 50th shade: Dutch/German

In Dutch and German, there is a weird combination of textbooks or traditional courses saying a thing and actual practice is quite different.

In Dutch, we have the "imperfectum", also called "incomplete past tense" (onvoltooid verleden tijd). In the overwhelming majority of the situations, it is exactly like the imperfetto/imparfait in French and Italian. However, the practice is quite different, because a lot of times it has the exact same meaning as the Past Simple in English. And according to books, it's not supposed to be like this.

Finding an example of this quirkiness was not difficult. Let's pay attention to "maakte ze af". We're supposed to get an imperfetto/imparfait.

So, we get no "would/used to" in English and no imperfetto/imparfait in French and Italian. WTH.

And in German?

Die Cinematek (damals noch Cinémathèque) war wie eine Schule für sie, denn weder ihre Sekundarschulbildung noch die Filmschule hat sie abgeschlossen.

Plot twist. We got the equivalent of a passé composé/passato prossimo in German. I translated it with ChatGPT, but I still remember that when I learned a bit of German at school they used to tell us that the "imperfect" was for written texts and the other one for spoken language.

My German is too poor to say more about my experiences, but what I've realized in Dutch is that "to have", "to be" and "to become" are more often than not in the Imperfectum tense just like we would do in English with the Past Simple. For the other verbs, we switch to a more Italian/French kind of use of the two tenses, unless we're talking about a subordinate sentence where we go back to the Past Simple.

You can see it right in the example above where we find "maakte ze af" in the subordinate clause introduced by "want". In this context, also the fact that it is a written text taken from the official Flemish television channel may have played a role in making it slightly more formal.

...want noch haar middelbare studies, noch de filmschool, maakte ze af.