Verbs: Imperfect Tense — Romanian Grammar

Romanian has a second past tense, the imperfect. While the perfect reports a single finished event ("I left"), the imperfect describes the past as ongoing, habitual, or a background state - "I was leaving", "I used to live", "it was raining". It is the tense for setting a scene and for "used to".

How It Is Built

Unlike the perfect, the imperfect is a single word with no helper: an ending is added straight to the stem, and it carries the person:

-am (I), -ai (you), -a (he/she), -am (we), -ați (you pl.), -au (they)

An -a or -î verb takes these endings as they stand ( → ). The other groups put an e in front of them ( → , I was going), and after a vowel that e is written i ( → ).

locuiam
I used to live / I was living
eram
I was
aveam
I had / I used to have

The Two Pasts Side by Side

The contrast with the perfect is the whole point. The imperfect is the lasting situation; the perfect is the thing that then happened:

Când eram tânăr, locuiam în China.
When I was young, I lived in China.

Here both verbs are imperfect because they describe an extended past situation, not one quick event.

Typical Uses

Repeated or habitual past action ("used to"): - I used to go to school.
A state or description in the past: - it was cold.
Background to another event: - I was sleeping when the phone rang.

Vacanța e mai bună decât mă așteptam.
The holiday is better than I expected. (expecting is a state that lasted, so the imperfect)

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