It Was the Best of Times

In this Topic, we're going to learn how to talk about nouns and な-Adjectives in the past tense. As usual, this is different for polite and standard language. With this we will be able to use all applicable word types in the past tense (い-Adjectives, verbs, な-Adjectives, and nouns)!

このトピックに出てくる文法

今すぐ学習する

だった・でした
Was, Were (Past tense)
In order to say that something 'was' a certain way in Japanese, you will need to use だった (casual) or でした (polite) attached to the end of a noun or な-Adjective. This is simply a combination of two auxiliary verbs, だ (or です when polite) with た. For だった, we will need to add った to the base form of だ. For です, す will change to し before adding た.
Caution

The past form of い-Adjectives cannot be linked with だった or でした, as they have their own set of conjugation rules.
N5 文法

詳細

Let's recap the conjugation rules and then review all the possible ways we now know to make the past tense.

It Was Conjugated

For both polite and standard forms, we need to add the past auxiliary verb た to the correctly conjugated auxiliary verb, だ or です.

だ

だ
ろ
- ＋ …
だ
っ
- ＋た
だ
- ＋ …
な
- ＋ …
な
ら
- ＋ …

です

で
し
ょ
- ＋ …
で
し
- ＋た
で
す
で
す
- ＋ …

What's Done Is Done

For applicable words, we can now turn any word into the past tense for both polite and standard speech. Let's review all of them to check the differences!

Nice!