You've already got a handle on talking about the present in Persian. Now, let's unlock the past and future. The key to most of this is a concept called the past stem, or bon-e gozashte in Persian. Once you can find the past stem of a verb, you can build several different tenses from it.

The past stem is the foundation for all past tenses. For most regular verbs, finding it is straightforward. You just take the infinitive form of the verb, which usually ends in -an (ـَن), and drop that ending.

For example, the infinitive 'to go' is raftan (رفتن). If we drop the -an, we're left with raft (رفت). That's our past stem. Let's look at a few more.

With the past stem identified, you can form the simple past tense. This tense describes a completed action in the past, like "I went" or "they saw." You simply take the past stem and add the correct personal ending.

The personal endings are the same ones you're familiar with from other conjugations. The only one to watch for is the third-person singular (u), which has no ending. The past stem itself serves as the full verb form.

What if you want to say "I was going" or "I used to go"? For this, Persian uses the imperfective past. It describes actions that were continuous, habitual, or in progress in the past.

Constructing it is easy. You take the simple past tense verb you just learned and add the prefix mi- (می) to the beginning.

Let's apply this to the verb didam (I saw). Adding the prefix gives us mididam (می‌دیدم), which means "I was seeing" or "I used to see."

Here’s how it looks for the full conjugation of raftan (to go).

The formal future tense in Persian relies on an auxiliary verb, or a "helping" verb. The verb for this job is khāstan (خواستن), which means 'to want'. In this context, though, it functions like the English word 'will'.

The formula involves conjugating khāstan in the present tense and adding the shortened infinitive of the main verb. A shortened infinitive is just the verb's infinitive form without the final '-an' or '-idan', which is identical to the past stem.

The present tense stem of khāstan is khāh-. Let's see how it combines with the past stem raft to say "will go."

Notice that only khāstan is conjugated. The main verb, raft, remains unchanged for every person. This makes the future tense quite regular and predictable once you know the pattern.

Now that you can form these tenses, let's test your knowledge.