Russian · Chapter 21 · Lesson 7 · Grammar primer
Past tense
Prescribed by the Edexcel specification - revisited.
The short version
The past agrees with gender, not person
Drop the -t from the infinitive and add -l, -la, -lo or -li for a masculine, feminine, neuter or plural subject. I, you and he all share one form, so a woman says ya znala where a man says ya znal. Polite vy always takes -li, even to one person.
Gde ty byla vchera?
In u menya byl, the verb agrees with the thing
Russian says I had a brother as at me was a brother, so the past of byt agrees with what is possessed, not with the owner. A woman says u menya byl brat; a man says u menya byla ideya. Absence is always ne bylo plus the genitive.
U menya ne bylo vremeni.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 17 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 7 of 19 in this chapter