#25 Preteritum and perfektum - How Norwegians look at the past [grammatikk] [on the go]

Let's dig into a clear mental model that strips away guesswork and shows exactly when to use preteritum, presens perfektum, and preteritum perfektum. Instead of memorizing lists, you’ll learn a focus rule: is the time window closed and you’re reliving a finished moment, or does the action still shape what matters now?

I look at English comparisons that often confuse learners. Norwegian doesn’t split past actions into continuous and simple the way English does—spiste can cover “I ate,” “I was eating,” and even emphatic “I did eat,” depending on context. Then we unpack why presens perfektum shines for present relevance: "har spist" explains why you’re not hungry, "har sett" anchors whether you’ll rewatch that film now, and "har bodd" marks an experience that continues up to now. 

You’ll also hear how Norwegians treat boundary moments—like asking "Hvordan har dagen vært?" while the day still unfolds and switching to "Hvordan var dagen?" when the day is considered over (i.e. the time window has closed and is considered past).

Expect practical, real‑life examples—pizza gone missing, movie invites, and Monday morning small talk—that (hopefully) help the logic stick fast.

If this helped, follow, rate, and send it to a friend who’s learning Norwegian!

Chapters

• 0:00 Walking Intro And Audio Notes
• 1:06 Why Learn On The Go
• 1:26 Today’s Focus: Norwegian Past Tense
• 2:02 Preteritum Vs Presens/Preteritum Perfectum
• 3:25 English Comparisons And Translations
• 5:30 Continuous, Habits, And Norwegian Simplicity
• 7:47 Questions In Past Without “Did”
• 10:19 Presens Perfektum: Present Focus
• 13:55 Ongoing Actions And Time Windows
• 16:25 Preteritum Perfektum: Past Reference Point
• 19:05 Ongoing Vs Over: Choosing Tense
• 21:20 Practical Nuance And Wrap-Up

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:14

Hey guys! Guess what? I just made a new episode while I was outside walking. It was such a good time. Unfortunately, the beginning was a little bit noisy because the wind was intense in the beginning. So I just wanted to make a short new introduction. I hope you enjoy it. Maybe I will make more episodes like this later. Enjoy! If the quality is really bad, then I might not publish this. But if it's okay, if the quality is okay, then I might make episodes like this from time to time. Uh maybe I'll just call them episode on the go so that you're aware that it might not be great quality. But if you hear me okay, I think that's the most important thing. Because the reason why I make this podcast is so that is for you to be able to learn when you are on the go. And I thought to myself, why not make them on the go as well? Then we can both get a little bit more movement in our lives, right? Anyways, today's topic is past tense in Norwegian. And I'm gonna use English as my reference and show you how it differs from English. And what I will talk about is two tenses that we call preteritum and perficum. And I'm gonna be a little bit more precise because perficum is not the full name. Perfictum, there are two types of perficum. You have preessence perfectum, which is the first tense you learn and which is the one you use the most of the time. And then we have one is which is called preteritum perfectum. So an example presence perfectum would be for instance har spist has eaten, and perfectum would be HUD speast had eaten. So basically, with presence perfectum you have hard in present tense, presence present tense, and then preteritum perfectum is with HUD, which is in preteritum. Had so when you get the first one right, the last one with Huda should not be too complicated to understand. But first of all, we need to understand the diff the main differences between these two tenses. So petitum uh for instance spies eight and press perfect hard spies has eaten. Uh not all of you have English as your mother tongue. And Norwegian conjugation follows more or less the same logic as in English, so it's good to use it as a reference point. But we do not so there are two things that differ. First thing is that we are a little bit stricter about how to use the two tenses, so how to distinguish when to use each of them. We the the way we differentiate different kinds of pasts, or the way we see the past, let's uh let's say it that way. The way we see the past is uh follows uh English uh in many ways, but we do not have as many tenses or we do not talk about the past in as many ways as in English, so it's much easier. Uh in but not all of you have English as a mother tongue, so uh even though we compare with English, that doesn't mean that uh all of you really understand how to to conjugate in English, and also in region we're a little bit stricter about uh how we talk about the past. So let's first uh first I'm just gonna tell you what the two conjugations can translate to in English. Okay, just to show you that one translation can can be translated in many ways in English and and why it is so. So for instance, when I say yes, that can translate to I ate, it can translate to I was eating, it can translate to I did eat. Uh yeah, so those three. And when I say I had speast, that can translate to I have eaten, which is the more straightforward translation, which is quite obvious. Ya I had, I have speast eat, but also I have been eating. Yeah, I guess that's it. Have you eaten? Yeah, that's those two. So let's look at my first example with Priteritum. Yes, pista. I ate. But yeah, spista can also mean I was eating. And what does that actually mean? I think it's called the past continuous, continuous past in English, uh, which basically means that in English you differentiate between something that was a habit that happened gen happened generally, like I ate uh pizza every Friday for instance, yeah, spista pizza verfred. Actually Norway's tacos, but anyways and when you got home I was eating pizza Da du komem spista Yay pizza. You see that's and that's something that happened while something else was happening. Right? So it was something that was actually ongoing at a certain moment. We do not differentiate between those two. Whether it happened in general or it happened at a specific point, we would in both examples we would use spista. So preteritum. So we do not differentiate those two, we do not uh differentiate between things that happened for a longer period of time and shorter period of time. I know there are some languages that do that, in Latin languages. I think it's quite common. We do not differentiate. So whether it's a short activity or a longer one, it doesn't matter. We we the the choice of past tense does not depend on how long that activity was and whether it happened while something else was going on or not. Okay? I'll come back to how we differentiate um the past tenses later. First we'll translate and then I'll I'll talk a little bit about the theory behind our use. In English you would also the like for instance in questions sometimes you use did and then infinitive. Uh like for instance did you eat? Spista do. So even though it is a question, we will still use just speast, nothing else. Now in English this has a function that I just got aware of. I didn't think about that, but the did is always followed by the subject in English. And in some questions, your question word is actually the subject. And in that case, you do not use did. So for instance, if I say uh what did you eat, right? You are the subject, you ate something. Whereas if I say what ate you, then it means like which thing ate you. So which thing was the subject that ate you the object. Uh in England, in Norwegian, well, that's a very like it's a very strange sentence, and normally in Norwegian you would you in both cases you would say vaspisted. Well, you would say vas piece to do, what did you eat, and if it was what ate you, it would be vast piece to die, what ate you, right? So it would be understandable in this case, um, and there are a few cases where that it could be uh difficult to understand who did what, who was the person doing the action and who was the one receiving the action. But in most cases it's very understandable. So we never we never ask a question with did by adding did and then the main verb. We just use the main verb in past tense directly. So yeah, so we did eat is the equivalent of spista and eight spista as well. Was eating spista okay? Now over to presens perfectim. Jag har spist pizza var fredag i år I have been eating pizza every Friday this year. Jagisel, jag har spist pizza. I'm not hungry, I have eaten pizza. So the difference here would be that the first one would be something ongoing and the other one talking about a specific event now let's talk about the difference between these two concepts and how the use differs a little bit from how English differentiate these times. So we can start with Priteritum. When we use Priteritum, our goal is to relive the past. When you're telling a story, when you're talking about your weekend, or when you're talking about when you lived in this or that country, or you traveled somewhere, you will use Preteritum. We're rediscovering the past. And we do not necessarily tell in every sentence when this happened, but we do have a time reference more or less precise. You are uh maybe in your first sentence you will say last week I did this and this and this, and then I did this, and then I did this. Um you don't have to state that in every sentence that it was last week because we get it. We already have that information. So one of the rules you learn for Norwegian is that when you have the information for when it happened, you need to use preteritum, which is true. But even when you don't have the time, you still might need to use preteritum because we know when it happened. We are reliving the past. We're trying to imagine how it was. Uh sometimes it's not very clear exactly when it was. Sometimes the only statement you need is fur before. Fur is very vague, right? That can be any time. So with with words like fur, you are fli yeah, like you can choose both. You can use preteritum, but you can also use perfectum. It depends what your focus is. So that is very important. When you choose which one to use, your focus should be your focus. So preteritum, you're reliving the past. When it happened is important, and we do not necessarily care about what that means now. You just want to tell a fun story and get the other person to imagine how that was at that specific time. That is your focus. Now, when you use padficum, both of them, but we're gonna start with pre essence perfectum, hard speast, for instance, you are more focused on the present. That is why it's called presence perfectum, and that is why we use a helping verb in present tense. Hard. That's your helping verb. So there are two scenarios here, or we can we can say there are three scenarios. Um one is you don't know when it happened, you just know that it has happened. Your focus then is not on when it happened because you don't know when it happened, but you can see that it has happened, right? And that is your focus. So you're focusing on the result of that action right now. So if you enter the door and you see there's no pizza then well you know what has happened, right? But you don't know when it happened. Nuan Hodist Pizza and Min. Somebody has eaten my pizza. You're not reliving the past. You don't care about how that felt for that person who ate your pizza. What you care about is what that means for you right now. You have no pizza. So that is what you're dealing with. You are living in the moment and you are wondering who has eaten your pizza. Where is your pizza right now? Okay, so that's one thing. You don't know when it happened and you don't really care because the pizza's gone. And then you have another case where you do know when it happened, but it's not important because you care about what that means for you right now. So imagine somebody asks you Ah Vildu Gopo Hino or say Spider-Man Do you want to go to the movies and watch Spider Man? And you answer Ah Yeah set then all I have seen it already. You know when you watched it. Maybe it was two years ago, maybe it was one week ago. Doesn't matter. You're not trying to relive the past, you can of course do that and talk about how that experience was, then you're reliving the past and you would use plateritum. But your focus is on what does that mean for today, right now? And that could mean different things depending on the context. So if you say, uh yeah, how it set an alarada, that might mean, uh no, I don't want to see it again right now, or uh no, I didn't like it, so I'm definitely not gonna watch it again. Uh or maybe it means I want to watch another move, another movie, right? So it means that you've seen it, so this experience is important for right now. It determines what your choice is gonna be. Are you gonna watch the movie or not? Okay, so focus is on what does this mean for my choice. And then we have a different kind of use of presence perfectum, which is when you're talking about something that is still going on, or at least until this very moment. It might end right now in one second, but up until now it has been true. And in English we do you do the same thing, you use sim similar tense to presence perfect term. So you would for instance you can say bud inorige i tre or jai harbud inorige itre or I have been living in Norway for three years. I actually not sure if you say I have been living or I have lived in Norway. I guess you would say I have been living in Norway for three years. So because it's something ongoing, right? So yeah, that would probably be the most logic one. We do not, we still do not differentiate those two. The context makes sense. If you normally, if you've lived in a country for three years, it is something that matters. Uh it's not just some random thing that happened, right? Uh, especially if you mention how long it took, how long it lasted, you would never use presence perfectum if that was still not the case. If it was in the past, I would use preteritum, even though I'm not mentioning exactly when, because the other person can have an ID by the context when it happened. So you see the rule that you use preteritum when we know when it happened is not so good because we very often use it even though we're not saying exactly when it happened. Uh yeah, so uh if somebody says to you, Ya I had Budinorgi Itre Or, uh well, first of all, you would know if they're still living there, probably, since you are in Norway. And the thing is here, what why do we use precens perfectum? Well, we are focusing on the present, we are in the present. Uh so it's something that started in the past and that is still ongoing, still happening, and very often we use that to say like what kind of experience we have, what does that mean for us right now? Right, for instance, oh if I say oh yeah, no. I've been working for five hours now. What does that mean? Am I reliving the past? No. I'm telling now I'm tired. Right? So we're still focusing on now. What does this mean for me now? So yeah, that's some that are the differences between when to use presence perfectum and when to use preteritum. But then we also have something called preteritum perfectum preteritum perfectum super fancy name. For instance, ja had spist ja hade spist du kom. I had eaten when you came home. Priteritum perfectum is used in sentences together with preteritum because when you use preteritum perfectum your reference point is the past whereas when you use pretens perfectum your reference point is the present. So basically, if you are telling a story, right, and then you want to talk about something that happened before that time in the past or that had already happened before that time, then you can use preteritum perfectum. So for instance, in my case, yeah, I had this beast da du komem, I had eaten when you came home. Right? So you had you came home, that's past, and then the eating part happened before that again. It had already happened, it was already done, basically, before. That's it. That's the logic. So now you know, now you know the difference, and and I know that very often in English you use something similar to preteritum, where Norwegians would definitely not use preteritum, we would use presence perfecto. Like for instance, uh maybe uh you could say how was your day? It's not wrong to say that in Norwegian, but very often we would rather say vodan hard dogin vert how has your day been? Because unless we're very late in the evening the day is not over yet, right? So you cannot talk about something that is still ongoing as if it was in the past. Preteritum is only used for something that is over. So imagine okay, like imagine we are Wednesday, right? The week is not over. So I could not ask Vudanvar Ukkadi, the week is not over. I would have to say Vudan harkadi how has your week been? But if it is Sunday then I can if I want to, I can say Vudanvar Ukadi or Vudanvar Arabeits Ukadi Because then it's well depending on how you see it, the week is over. So that's an important thing to remember. Preteritum can only be used about things that are over that are in the past. Whereas presence perfection can also be used about things that started in the past. So the week started on Monday or Sunday depending on how you see it. And it is still ongoing. So it is a past event, but it's also a present event since it's ongoing. So when you go to your work on Monday, you might get the question hard Helga Vart How has the weekend been? And I know this might sound weird because the weekend is over. When you're Monday, the weekend is definitely over. But it's so close and I think maybe we still want to hold on to it. We don't want the we don't want to lose it. So and it's Monday, right? It just ended, it's so close that it's it's it's it has lasted up until the moment you arrive at your work, right? It's still weekend until your work day starts on Monday. So so that's the logic, but maybe on Tuesday you wouldn't say wood on hard helga ward. On Tuesday you would say. How was the weekend? Because Tuesday, even though we want to hold on to it, I guess we just have to accept that it's over. It's been one day already. So so yeah, you can find like sentences like that where like the use of preteritum and parfictum shows a little bit how how people perceive time. When it comes to preteritum, even though we do not do not always precise when something happened, we just often use it because we know that the other person knows what we're referring to. Right? If we're talking about when we went to school, for instance, we know when that was. We know that we didn't go to school when we were 30, probably most probably. Right? So we have an idea, we have cultural references, we can we can imagine when it happened. And and also because our focus is on the past, we're focusing on when that moment was uh reliving the past, remember? Imagine you you talk to a colleague and you say, Ah, this weekend I might go on a cabin trip. Then, when your colleague meets you on Monday, even though the weekend is maybe not considered over yet, uh he or she might ask you because then he or she is not referring to the whole weekend but the cabin trip, the plan you had. So and that is definitely over. So so using prete choosing preteritum over parfectum can also refer to something specific during the weekend or something specific during the day. Imagine uh yeah, I'm meeting you on Wednesday after uh I don't know, Wednesday evening and I know that you had some plans during the day that you were not like stressed about. I can say ah wouldn't var dog indin and then I'm not referring to the whole day, I'm referring to that the things that you were talking about, those specific things that are over. So whereas if I say wooden hard dogindin wart then it's more like in general the whole day up until now. So you so yeah, because when you use preteritum, you are always talking about something that is over. Whereas presence perfectium does not have to be over yet. Okay, I hope that helps. Let me know what you think and also let me know what you think about this on the go episode. Was the sound okay? I I enjoyed it at least. I've been walking around at this park and uh enjoying some fresh air, and I hope you have to talk for it!