Hej! Today we will have a look on how to construct past sentences which are useful when expressing ourselves regarding events who have already happened. Whilst speaking Swedish you will often have to use the past tense, therefore it is important that you know how everything works!

The past tense is pretty simple and is employed the same way as the English language. It consists of the present tense and their supine form. You get the past tense by using the imperfect form instead of the present tense. The imperfect form is created by adding a suffix to the stem. Confusing? Don't worry this lesson will make you understand the past tense very quickly.

A quick summary

There are two tenses which express the past in Swedish. The past simple and present perfect, "Preteritum" and "Perfekt".
We distinguish five groups of verbs which follows;

Group I, Group II a, Group II b , Group III , Group IV ( irregular verbs).

Group I - most of the Swedish verbs belong to this group
Group II - vers that end with -s, -p, -t and -k.
Group III - those are short verbs that end with vowels, ie; bo, tro , må
Group IV - irregular verbs

Note! each form of the verb depends on the group that a verb belongs to.

Have a look at the following sentences;

Jag skrivde brevet igår - I wrote the letter yersterday.
Han läste boken om tre veckor sedan. He read the book about three weeks ago.
Esa köpte nya skor i fredags. Esa bought new shoes last Friday.

Look at the table below in order to see how the verbs are constructed.

Infinitif	Past	Ending	Meaning	Group
prata , träna	pratade , tränade	-ade	talk , train	Group I
ringa, glömma	ringde, glömde	-de	call , forget	Group II
läsa, köpa	läste , köpte	- te	read (learn) , buy	Group II b
bo, tro	bodde , trodde	- dde	live (occupy) , believe	Group III
komma , skriva	kom , skrev	några olika	go, write	Group IV

Have a go at writing your own sentences and use the table as guideline if your are unsure.

Swedish imperfect and perfect tense

In order to create the imperfect tense you add 'de' to the stem, however it will not be added if the stem ends with a voiceless consonant i.e: (f, k, p, s, t etc.) that's when you attach 'te'.

In regards to the supine (indifferent), it is formed by attaching 't' to the stem.

As this group consists of many irregular verbs, In the imperfect tense most Swedish verbs don't have a suffix. They simply just change the stem-vowel. In the supine, most verbs change the stem-vowel again and add 'ít' or 'at' at the end. Have a look at the table below for for examples.

Verbs	Stem	Imperfect	Supine	Perfect	Past perfect
tala (speak)	tala-	talade	talat	har talat	hade talat
ringa (call)	ring-	ringde	ringt	har ringt	hade ringt
springa (to run)	spring-	sprang	sprungit	har sprungit	hade sprungit
ha (have)	ha-	hade	haft	har haft	hade haft
äta (eat)	ät-	åt	ätit	har ätit	hade ätit

Rememer:
This tense is used to express something which has already happened and that has an influence on the present.

We hope you have enjoyed the lesson and have learnt on how to use and construct sentences using the past tense. Now have a look below at the short video on Swedish past tense. Why not go and have a look at the rest of the Swedish online course. See you soon!