The Four Mongolian Pasts, and How to Choose

Four endings, and the one you will use first

English has a single past tense and then builds the rest out of auxiliaries: I went, I have gone, I had gone, I did go. Mongolian goes the other way. It has four separate endings, each a single piece glued to the stem, and the difference between them is not a difference of time depth. It is a difference of what kind of statement you are making.

Read the middle column before the others. Three of the four are what this guide calls finite indicatives — forms that close a sentence and fix its time, which is roughly what a tense does in English. The fourth, the one you will use twenty times a day, is not a tense at all. It is a participle.

The everyday Mongolian past, –сан, is a participle

That sentence is worth reading twice, and it is worth stating in exactly those words rather than in the dramatic version you will see elsewhere, which is that Mongolian has no past tense. Mongolian has three past-tense forms, and they are listed above. What it also has is a participle that has quietly taken over the job, and the commonest way to say I did something is therefore to use a form that is not, strictly, a verb ending at all.

The ending is cited in this guide as –сан / –сон / –сэн / –сөн, four shapes of one suffix picked by the vowels of the stem; the set and the rule that chooses between them are on the four-form suffix table. In use:

• Би Францаас ирсэн. (I come from France — literally, I arrived from France.)
• Та хаанаас ирсэн бэ? (where are you from?)
• Би түүнтэй өчигдөр уулзсан. (I met him yesterday.)
• Миний найз ном авсан. (my friend bought a book.)
• Байгалийн түүхийн музейд очсон уу? (have you been to the natural history museum?)
• Бид хамт байсан. (we were together.)

Morpheme by morpheme, so that the shape is unmistakable:

• Би түүнтэй өчигдөр уулзсан.
• I him-COM yesterday meet-PAST
• "I met him yesterday."

Notice the first two examples. English uses a present tense — I come from France, where are you from — and Mongolian uses the past, because the arriving is over and done. That mismatch catches every beginner once, and once is usually enough.

Why calling it a participle is not pedantry

Because it predicts something. A participle can also stand in front of a noun and describe it, where English hangs a relative clause off the back, and –сан does that as readily as it closes a sentence — a construction that is taken apart on the page on participles and not here.

What belongs here is the consequence for reading a past. The narrative –в can never stand before a noun, and the method says so in as many words. So the two endings are not interchangeable even where an English translation would not tell them apart: a past form sitting in front of a noun is a –сан, and the chunk it begins is one long description rather than a finished clause. Nothing in the spelling warns you in advance, which is why the label is worth carrying around rather than filing away.

–лаа: not past, but near

The second ending is cited as –лаа / –лоо / –лээ / –лөө, and the method says something about it that is easy to miss and impossible to unlearn once you have it: what counts is not past or future, but proximity. The same form covers something that has only just happened and something that is about to happen in the next instant.

An English speaker tries to split that into two tenses and cannot, because English has no form that straddles the present the way this one does. The closest English comes is the announcement: right, I'm off, there, it's stopped. Both of those are about the edge of now, and that is exactly what –лаа marks.

On consonant-final stems the ending attaches with nothing in between, so the forms are short and easy to recognise: явлаа, авлаа, ирлээ, зогслоо. Two words reinforce the sense when you want it unmistakable, сая and саяхан, both just now, recently, and дөнгөж сая narrows it further, to the instant that has only this second gone. The method's own sentence puts one of them in front of the verb: Ах чинь сая утасдлаа. (your brother has just phoned.)

–в: the past of narrative

The third ending describes an action begun and finished in the past, and the method is specific about where you will find it: in texts, and in reporting what happened. It does not vary — there is one shape, –в, which after a stem ending in a consonant appears with the connecting vowel the stem calls for.

• Оюутан өчигдөр Монголоос ирэв. (the student arrived from Mongolia yesterday.)
• Ахын морь нь Төв аймгийн наадамд түрүүлэв. (my brother's horse won at the Naadam in Töv province.)
• Оюунбаатар муу дуулав. (Oyunbaatar sang badly.)

All three are reports about somebody else. That is the register: third person, finished business, a tone a little more formal than conversation. Written Mongolian is full of it, and spoken Mongolian uses it when somebody is telling you what happened rather than chatting. You should be able to read it from the first week; you can leave producing it until later, and nobody will think less of your Mongolian for using –сан instead.

What you must not do is skip it. A form that appears on every page of every newspaper is not optional knowledge, and a learner who has only met –сан will stare at ирэв and fail to recognise a verb they already know.

–жээ: for reading only

The fourth, cited as –жээ with the variant –чээ, marks a past event in written narrative, and it carries a flavour English handles with a phrase like as it turns out or so it was — the past of things reported rather than witnessed. The method's own example is the one to keep:

• Урьд энэ газар том хот байжээ. (long ago there was a great city in this place.)

That sentence could open a folk tale, and that is roughly its range. The method gives the ending, gives that one sentence, and offers no rule for using it — which is itself the advice. Learn to recognise –жээ and leave producing it alone. You will see it in legends, in history and in anything with the cadence of storytelling. Produce it in conversation and you will sound like somebody reciting.

байсан, and the two forms it builds

байсан is simply бай– plus –сан, the past of the verb you met as байна: Бид хамт байсан (we were together). What makes it worth a section of its own is that it is also an auxiliary, and that swapping it in for байна moves a whole two-piece construction into the past without touching the main verb.

The progressive first. –ж байна is an action in progress now; put байсан in place of байна and it is an action that was in progress then:

• Тэмээчин энэ ажлыг хийж байсан. (the camel herder was doing this work.)

Then the habit, which is the one English speakers want and cannot find. English says used to; Mongolian adds байсан behind the habitual ending and changes nothing else. The method's pair:

• Миний аав их сургуульд ажилладаг. (my father works at the university.)
• Миний аав их сургуульд ажилладаг байсан. (my father used to work at the university.)

One extra word, no suffixes disturbed, and байсан itself never changes shape. If you have learned –даг and –ж from the page on the present and future, the past versions of both cost you exactly one word.

The choice, in four lines

1. It happened in the last few seconds, or you are announcing that you are off: –лаа.
2. It used to happen, as a habit or a job: the habitual plus байсан.
3. You are reading a text, or reporting a finished event in a formal register: –в, and –жээ if the text has the ring of a story.
4. Anything else at all: –сан.

The fourth line is doing most of the work, and that is the honest shape of the system. A beginner who uses –сан for every past and learns to recognise the other three has not cut a corner; they have described Mongolian as it is actually spoken.

Three questions this page does not answer

Which of the four shapes of –сан or –лаа to write is a matter of vowel harmony, and that is settled on the harmony page and its table. How to say that something did not happen is not a matter of placing a word in front of the verb: each past form has its own negative, and they are collected on the page on saying no. And the second job of –сан, the one where it stands in front of a noun and does the work of an English relative clause, is on the page on participles, which is where that construction is taken apart properly.