Up until this point we have been using stative sentences to describe the world around us with sentences like “I am thirsty”; “The water is hot”; or “The coffee is expensive.” Now we are going to learn how to talk about what we’ve done, with sentences such as “I drank the coffee.” To do this, we will be learning how to make basic past tense sentences in Chamorro with transitive verbs.

Contents
Introduction to Past Tense Transitive Sentences Hu Type Pronouns Transitive Verbs Article “i” Example Sentences: “I Drank The Coffee” Wrapping Up: Keep Practicing on Quizlet! Keep Learning! Continue to the Next Lesson

Introduction to Past Tense Transitive Sentences

Sometimes we want to make sentences talking about actions that we have done to other people or things. Some examples of these kinds of sentences are as follows: “I made the soup”; “They bought the milk”; “You took the keys”.

These sentences have three key parts:

• A subject who does the action (I, They, You)
• An action word (made, bought, took)
• An object that the action is done to (the soup, the milk, the keys)

These sentences are all examples of Transitive Sentences because the action words are all Transitive Verbs, which means that their actions must be done to something else. These sentences also have Objects, which receive the action. If you want to review these concepts more in-depth, check out Lesson 09: Talking about Actions and Objects – Introduction to Transitive Verbs in Chamorro.

These are the types of sentences we will learn how to make in this post. In order to make these sentences in Chamorro, we need the following

1. Hu Type Pronouns
2. Transitive Verbs
3. The Article “i”

Now that we’ve covered the kind of sentence we are going to learn, let’s talk about Hu Type Pronouns.

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Hu Type Pronouns

Up until this point we’ve only been using the Yu’ Type pronouns in our basic sentences, such as in statements like Yayas yu’ (I am tired). For these basic transitive sentences we use the Hu Type Pronouns, and they are the subject of the sentence (the one doing the action).

To get started, here are the Hu type pronouns with audio:

Chamorro	English
Hu	I
Un	You (singular)
Ha	He / She / It
Ta	We (inclusive)
In	We (exclusive)
En	You (plural)
Ma	They (plural)

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Transitive Verbs

The verbs that we use in these sentences are transitive verbs, and we are not making any modifications to these verbs. And when translated in this sentence type, these verbs translate to the past tense.

How To Find Transitive Verbs

If you want to find more transitive verbs to practice with, there are two main ways to do this:

If you have a physical copy of the Chamorro-English Dictionary by Donald M. Topping, Pedro M. Ogo, and Bernadita C. Dungca, look for the words with a number “1” after them. These are words that can be used as transitive verbs.

Another way to find transitive verbs is to look in the Revised and Updated Chamorro-English Dictionary from the CNMI and to look for words with vt. after them, which indicates it is a transitive verb.

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Article “i”

We’ve used this article before in our basic sentences, like betde i franela (the t-shirt is green). We will now use this article in our past tense sentences. It will be used in front of our objects, as a way to indicate that it is something specific, such as “i franela” (the t-shirt).

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Example Sentences: “I drank the coffee”

Now that we’ve learned the pieces required to make a basic action sentence, let’s learn the structure and go over some sentence drills. The sentence structure we can use is as follows:

Hu Type Pronoun + Transitive Verb + i + Object

Here are some sentence drills to get us started:

Hu kånno i mansåna.	I ate the apple.
Hu ayao i lepblo.	I borrowed the book.
Hu gimen i kafe.	I drank the coffee.
Ha fåhan i bestidu.	She bought the dress.
Ha hatsa i balakbak.	He lifted the backpack.
Ha chule’ i kareta.	She took the car.
Un fa’gåsi i platu.	You washed the plate.
Un li’e i batkon aire.	You saw the airplane.
Un fa’tinas i kadu.	You made the soup.
Ta na’gasgas i kusina.	We cleaned the kitchen. (incl.)
Ta egga’ i mubi.	We watched the movie. (incl.)
Ta yamak i bentåna.	We broke the window. (incl.)
En utot i hayu.	You (pl.) chopped the wood.
En hungok i binådu.	You (pl.) heard the deer.
En arekla i siya.	You (pl.) repaired the car.
Ma bende i frutas.	They sold the fruit.
Ma apasi i guagualo’.	They paid the farmer.
Ma konne’ i guihan.	They caught the fish.
In bisita i techa.	We visited the prayer leader. (excl.)
In usa i kareta.	We used the car. (excl.)
In yite’ i setbesa.	We threw away the beer. (excl.)

Special Note About 3+ People: Any of the sentences above that have plural pronouns (Ta, In, En, Ma) can refer to 2 people or 3+ people. This is an important distinction in Chamorro because other sentence structures require modifications to the verbs when there are 3+ subjects. For the sentences covered in this post, no additional modification is needed to the verb to make it refer to 3+ people because these are transitive sentences with definite objects.

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Wrapping Up: Keep Practicing on Quizlet!

In this lesson, we have learned how to make Past Tense Sentences with Transitive Verbs.

If you want more practice with the example sentences in this lesson, use this Quizlet Flashcard Deck as a supplementary study tool.

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Keep Learning! Continue to the Next Lesson

And that concludes our post! When you are ready, click the link below to go to the next lesson to learn about adding more detail to objects in these sentences:

Lesson 11: Adding More Detail to Objects – “I drank the hot coffee.”