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Present and Future: Three Forms Where English Has One

English lets one verb form stand for a habit, for what is happening now and for what will happen tomorrow. Mongolian does not allow that blur, and the choice it forces on you is the most expensive habit to acquire in the whole language.

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One English sentence, two Mongolian ones

Take a sentence as flat as they come: I live in Paris. In Mongolian there are two ways to say it, and they are not two styles of the same thing. They are two different claims about your life.

An English speaker looks at this and reaches for the explanation that comes to hand: a progressive against a simple present, like I am living against I live. That analogy gets you about half way and then quietly misleads you, because the English progressive is about the moment and the Mongolian –даг form is about the long run. The dividing line is not now-versus-always; it is temporary-versus-settled. And the choice is compulsory. There is no neutral third option you can take when you do not want to commit, which is exactly why this page is the one that costs beginners the most.

Three endings do the work, and a fourth form sits just behind them. Taken in the order they will be useful to you: the present-future –на, the imperfective –ж байна, the habitual –даг, and –ж байгаа for something that started earlier and is still running.

–на, and why it is called present-future

The ending is cited in this guide as –на / –но / –нэ / –нө, four shapes of one suffix chosen by the vowels of the stem; the whole set and the rule behind it are on the four-form suffix table. On a few common verbs: явна (goes, will go), ирнэ (comes, will come), очно (visits, will visit), өгнө (gives, will give), үзнэ (sees, will see), иднэ (eats, will eat), уулзана (meets, will meet), хүлээнэ (waits, will wait).

Two things about it are worth more than any amount of practice. The first is that one form serves every person. Би маргааш явна is I am going tomorrow; Бид маргааш ирнэ is we are coming tomorrow; Тэр маргааш ажиллана is he is working tomorrow. Nothing on the verb moved. An English speaker spends a few days waiting for the catch and there is no catch — the reason is on the page on verbs.

The second is the name. The method is explicit that Mongolian is perfectly aware of the difference between the present and the future; it simply does not put that difference in the verb. So one single form covers both, and what decides which you mean is the rest of the sentence.

What carries the time, since the verb does not

A word or two, dropped in before the verb. одоо (now), өнөөдөр (today), маргааш (tomorrow), нөгөөдөр (the day after tomorrow). With one of those present, the sentence is unambiguous and the verb has nothing left to do:

Notice the fourth one. Without a time word, Тэр надад хоёр бууз өгнө can be read either way, and the method translates it with the ambiguity left in. That is not sloppiness: a Mongolian sentence of that shape genuinely does not say, and in conversation nobody needs it to. If you want to pin it down, you add the word. You do not change the verb.

This is the single most liberating fact on the page, and it is worth saying bluntly: you do not have a future tense to learn. English speakers arrive expecting one, hunt for it, and are slow to believe it is absent.

–ж байна and –ч байна: happening as you speak

For an action under way at the moment of speaking, the verb takes –ж or –ч and then the auxiliary байна follows as a separate word. Two pieces, always in that order:

More of them, because this is a form you will hear constantly: Би чамд нууцаа хэлж байна (I am telling you my secret), Тэр хятад хөгжим сонсож байна (she is listening to Chinese music), Би нэг хүйтэн шар айраг ууж байна (I am drinking a cold beer), Би энэ номыг уншиж байна (I am reading this book).

And then a use that takes English speakers by surprise, because it covers states where English would never use a progressive at all: Би өлсөж байна (I am hungry), Би цангаж байна (I am thirsty), Би яарч байна (I am in a hurry). English handles those with be plus an adjective. Mongolian treats being hungry as something you are currently doing. Learn the three as they stand; they come up on the first day.

–ж or –ч? There is no rule, and that is the rule

You will want to know which verbs take –ж and which take –ч, and the honest answer the method gives is that you cannot predict it from the last consonant of the stem. яв– gives явж, but ав– gives авч — two of the commonest verbs in the language, both ending in в, and they part company. The method's advice is to learn each verb together with its form, which is also what a Mongolian child does.

In practice –ж is much the commoner of the two, so if you are caught out, that is the better guess. Attested examples of each, to start the list you will build by ear: хэлж, ирж, сонсож, ууж, уншиж, хийж, өлсөж, цангаж, сурч, амьдарч, яарч, авч.

This is one of the few places in the guide where the answer is "memorise it one verb at a time" — the conditional's –вал / –бал and the collective's linking vowel are the others — and it is worth noticing how small each of those concessions is. One binary choice, on a closed list of verbs, learned the way you learned which English verbs take –ed. Against that, Mongolian hands you a verb that never changes for person.

–даг: a statement about how things are, not about now

The habitual is cited as –даг / –дог / –дэг / –дөг, again four shapes of one suffix. The method describes what it expresses as a regular, habitual, repeated and long-term activity, and the word long-term is the one to hold on to.

The third of those is instructive. My house is in Paris is not a habit in any English sense, and yet it takes –даг, because the form is about permanence rather than repetition. A building's location is settled, so the settled form is used. Once you read –даг as this is how it is rather than as this happens often, that sentence stops being an exception.

The fourth is the one you will be asked. Та юу хийдэг вэ? is what do you do, meaning what is your work — not what are you doing at this moment, which would need –ж байна. Answer it with –даг and you have answered the question that was asked.

The pair at the centre of the page

The method sets two sentences side by side, and if you take one thing away from here, take these. Same subject, same verb, same place, different ending:

MongolianWhat it claims
Тэр өнөөдөр ажиллаж байна.she is at work today — this is what she is doing
Миний ээж тэнд ажилладаг.my mother works there — that is her job
Би одоогоор монгол хэл сурч байна.I am learning Mongolian at the moment
Монголчууд мах их иддэг.Mongolians eat a lot of meat, as a people

English uses one present tense for the whole table and leaves the rest to context and to extra words — at the moment, for a living, as a rule. Mongolian puts the information in the suffix, which means two things for you. You cannot avoid saying it, and you never have to add the extra words.

–ж байгаа: begun earlier, still running

There is a fourth shape, and it is cheaper than it looks, because the verb does not change at all. Keep the –ж and swap the auxiliary: байна becomes байгаа.

The difference is one of extent: байгаа reaches back from the moment of speaking to a start somewhere behind it, where байна just names the moment. English makes the same distinction with I am learning against I have been learning, so for once the translation is nearly automatic. Note only that the Mongolian pieces are in a different place: the stem and its –ж are untouched and the whole change sits in the auxiliary.

Everything байна does when it is not an auxiliary — standing alone as be, saying that something exists, saying where it is — belongs to its own page. Here it is only the second half of a two-piece verb form.

Choosing, in the order the question actually arrives

You are about to say something, and three endings are available. Ask yourself, in this order:

  1. Is it going on right now, as I speak? If yes, –ж байна or –ч байна. If it has also been going on for a while, байгаа instead of байна.
  2. Is it a standing fact about somebody's life, work or habits? If yes, –даг. The test is whether you would answer the question what do you do? with it.
  3. Is it neither — something I am reporting as a plan, an intention or a general statement of what happens? Then the present-future –на, with a time word if the moment matters.

Two errors are worth naming, because almost every English speaker makes them in that order. The first is reaching for –на as a default present, because it looks like the plain form and English's plain form is the default. It is not a default; a bare –на with no time word is read as a plan more readily than as a running action. The second is using –ж байна for a habit, because English can say I am working in Paris about a two-year job. In Mongolian that sentence says you are there for now, and a Mongolian listener will hear it that way.

Settled elsewhere

Three things that belong to this family of forms but not to this page. Negation first, since it does not work by putting a single not in front of anything: each of these endings has its own negative, and the whole set is on the page on saying no. Then –даг in its other job: because it is a participle, it can also stand in front of a noun, and that side of it is on the page on participles. And finally the past, where байна gives way to байсан and the same two-piece machinery keeps working — on the page on the past.

Exercises: present, future, habit and progress

Choose the form that fits the meaning described, or answer the question about the rule.

  1. To say you are in Paris for a few weeks, you say ___.
  2. To say Paris is where you live, you say ___.
  3. The line between –ж байна and –даг is ___.
  4. Би маргааш явна and Бид маргааш явна differ in ___.
  5. What decides whether –на means now or soon is ___.
  6. In Хотод бид маргааш өглөө хүрнэ, the word that fixes the time is ___.
  7. Mongolian expresses the future with ___.
  8. The imperfective is built as ___.
  9. Автобус одоо ирж байна means ___.
  10. To say you are hungry, you say ___.
  11. Би яарч байна means ___.
  12. Whether a verb takes –ж or –ч is ___.
  13. The pair that proves the last consonant does not decide is ___.
  14. –даг expresses ___.
  15. Миний гэр Парис хотод байдаг takes –даг because ___.
  16. Та юу хийдэг вэ? asks ___.
  17. If someone asks what you are doing at this moment, you answer with ___.
  18. Moving from сурч байна to сурч байгаа changes ___.
  19. Би монгол хэл сурч байгаа is closest to English ___.
  20. Тэр өнөөдөр ажиллаж байна tells you ___.
  21. Миний ээж тэнд ажилладаг tells you ___.
  22. To say Mongolians eat a lot of meat as a people, you use ___.
  23. Using –ж байна for a job you have held for two years would tell a Mongolian listener ___.
  24. Treating –на as a default present is a mistake because ___.
  25. To make any of these forms negative you need ___.

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The whole Mongolian grammar, page by page

Start here
Script and sound
The suffix machine
The seven cases
The noun phrase
The verb
The sentence
Particles and register