Lesson 24: Adjectives in Past Tense and Like/Dislike

Lesson 22 detailed how to conjugate い and な adjectives in the present tense. You learned both affirmative and negative conjugations. Now, we will learn both the negative and positive conjugations for adjectives in the past tense. If you are still uncomfortable with the present tense forms of the adjectives, review Lesson 22 before moving on to this lesson. You will also learn how to say your likes and dislikes in this lesson. The adjectives for “like” and “dislike” function the same way the other adjectives in this lesson do.

い Adjectives

In order to conjugate an い adjective into the affirmative past tense, you must drop the final い symbol and add かったですto the end. For example, おもしろい would become おもしろかったです. This would mean that something in the past was interesting. You could say “That movie was interesting,” by saying そのえいがはおもしろかったです.

For the past tense negative, you must drop the final い and add く. After く, you need to add ありませんでした. Notice how theです in the affirmative changes to でした (the past tense of です). This occurs even though both phrases are in the past tense. If you wanted to say “That movie was not interesting,” you could say そのえいがはおもしろくありませんでした.

な Adjectives

To make the affirmative past tense form of a な adjective, you first need to drop the な ending. After this, simply add でした. Likewise, for the negative past tense form, drop the な ending first. Then, add じゃありませんでした. Take きれいな as an example. You could say “That town was pretty,” by saying そのまちはきれいでした. You could also say “That town was not pretty,” by saying そのまちはきれいじゃありませんでした.

Irregular Adjectives

The only irregular adjective you really need to worry about is いい. When you conjugate this into the past affirmative form, you must change いい to よかったです. When conjugating いい into the past negative form, you must change いい to よくありませんでした. This adjective does not follow any established patterns, so you will just have to memorize it.

Talking About Likes and Dislikes

There is a specific adjective for “like” and also an adjective for “dislike.” すきな is “like” and きらいな is “dislike.”

The sentence structure for talking about your likes and dislikes is like this:

X は Y がすきです.

In the above structure, すき can be replaced with きらい. The subject is not necessary if you are talking about yourself, but if you are referring to someone else’s likes and dislikes, you can add a subject. It is important to remember that すき and きらい always use が as their particle.

You can also amp up these two adjectives by adding だい in front of the word. This changes “like” to “really like” or even “love” whereas “dislike” changes to “hate.”

だいすきです= to really like something, or love something

だいきらいです = to hate something

Practice I

Conjugate the following い adjectives into the past affirmative and past negative forms.